Gadgetory

there's an old adage for computer novices that says if you can smash something with a hammer its hardware but if you can only swear at it in futility its software but not everything is that cut-and-dried and one of the most important parts of your PC is actually a closely linked fusion of hardware and software I'm talking about the basic input/output system or BIOS which I certainly don't recommend hitting with a hammer by the way no matter how upset you are so the BIOS is a very small piece of code that sits on a read-only or a flash memory chip on your computer's motherboard it's often referred to as the motherboards firmware since it links the software to the hardware but how well think about it kind of like a person your brain stem helps control very fundamental bodily functions like breathing in your heartbeat but it doesn't do any actual thinking so your computer's BIOS does some very basic but crucial things without which you couldn't watch tech quickie or have your redbull fueled csgo marathons but it doesn't you know render graphics or anything like that so when you first turn your computer on the BIOS is the first thing to spring into action and wake up the rest of your computer kind of like how your car's ignition gets the engine going the BIOS first checks settings stored in a CMOS chip to determine how the user wants the system to run so that's all that stuff that's in the utility that you get to by mashing delete or f2 when you first boot up then what it does is it initializes your devices accordingly CPU Ram graphics card peripherals and so on after this the BIOS will run the power-on self-test or post to make sure that all the gizmos inside your case are functioning correctly if everything is hunky-dory you'll usually hear a single beep to let you know that everything's good provided that you installed the little speaker that came with your motherboard if you get an error you know like be pbbb pbbb it's not Morse code it's probably telling you you need to reseat your ram or video card or check for a part that's just plain gone kaput once that's done the BIOS will check for a bootable device meaning some kind of drive with an operating system on it and then it'll hand off control of your computer to the OS now old-school BIOS is often provided a link between your keyboard mouse and other devices and the OS while modern operating systems like newer versions of Windows control the hardware more directly so once you're at the Windows desktop your BIOS basically goes to sleep until you need it to start things up again seems pretty straightforward right I'll sort of actually the way that the BIOS was implemented for a long time had some very serious limitations one of the most obvious of them being drive support the system that a conventional BIOS uses to access your hard drive or SSD called the Master Boot Record or MBR could only handle partitions less than two terabytes and that was fine for a long time but with many modern hard drives holding way more data it became obvious that something new was needed the unified extensible firmware interface or UEFI which no one can agree how to pronounce was born not only can you efi deal with insanely large storage devices we're talking millions of petabytes here it's also quicker than a conventional BIOS to boot up and can use an actual graphical interface complete with animations and mouse support older BIOS has only featured that blue screen that looked kind of like a crash but it was fine which at least I guess was better than the really old days where there was no BIOS utility at all and you had to physically move jumpers around on your motherboard in order to change settings speaking of going through tedious procedures in order to make basic changes to simple stuff FreshBooks is the tool that makes your accounting pretty much the most tedious part of running a small business simpler and more accurate it helps you get organized get paid on time and send out 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