This was a Lenovo. Now I’m wondering if Windows or Linux has a better BIOS.

  • @Gemini24601@lemmy.world
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    817 months ago

    The BIOS is an operating system, albeit a super low level one. What is wrong here? It would only be software gore if it said that it was part of the windows operating system, since the BIOS is a system operating system.

    • @TheMauveAvenger@lemmy.world
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      257 months ago

      Only thing that’s really off is that most people don’t need to update BIOS with any frequency, if at all, given the potential for ruining your PC. I certainly wouldn’t trust my parents with doing it on their own.

      • @jet@hackertalks.com
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        97 months ago

        Unless a major bios vulnerability has been identified that bypasses TPM and secure boot on Windows machines…

        Hopefully vendors like Lenovo have a bulletproof BIOS update pathway, and automatic fallback to the last bios of something goes wrong. Kind of like phone updates

        • @leds@feddit.dk
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          67 months ago

          Well my newish Lenovo work laptop is failing its BIOS update with the helpful error message that power is not plugged in (it is) or user cancelled (user did not) or another error (yay!)

  • Dave.
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    7 months ago

    It’s right there in the name:

    Basic Input Output Operating System

    It’s the first stage of whatever os you run.

    If you don’t think the BIOS is part of your operating system, just remove it and see how far you get on the next boot.

    Edit: I was always told the I in BIOS was “I/O”. WAS I DECEIVED FOR ALL THIS TIME!?

    • Vardøgor
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      467 months ago

      BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System.

      Semantically sure, it’s making your system operate, but it’s technically part of your motherboard’s firmware.

      • Dave.
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        57 months ago

        It’s the underlying system. You can run tiny bare metal programs in your boot sector that simply call bios functions to output to the screen and write to disk and beep the speaker, just like you can call functions to the windows or Linux kernels to do the same.

        Although granted the only functions called these days are to set the CPU to protected mode and goodbye BIOS until the next boot.

        • Vardøgor
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          7 months ago

          hmm. it’s a good point. it seems to me though that that just isn’t what “operating system” refers to, since these programs can’t actually manage the system in a meaningful way or do anything you’d really expect from an OS.

          • Dave.
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            17 months ago

            But circling back to OP’s screenshot it only mentions that it’s part of the OS. A pretty small part these days compared to DOS, but it’s still doing stuff.

            I guess it comes down to whether you consider all the initialisation/bootstrap/hardware configuration routines to be part of an operating system.

      • MxM111
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        -47 months ago

        Which is Operating System too, just not windows.

      • Dave.
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        17 months ago

        Chant it with me… BIOOOOOOS haha.

        There should be a slash in there.

        Basic Input/Output Operating System.

        At least, that’s what I was taught it was many decades ago.

  • FQQD
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    77 months ago

    One truth, one lie in the title. Guess which one’s which.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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      7 months ago

      Considering that when an uninstaller fails, and taking ownership of the broken files to remove them doesn’t seem to help, so you have to boot into Linux to forcibly remove them because Windows doesn’t let you do it, yes, it is part of Windows.

    • I’m having a crisis here thinking about this lol. It’s a part of the system that is your machine if you consider the system to be the entire use of the computer. But it is not a part of the operating system on the drive. It’s a lower level operating system that identifies your hardware’s capabilities and functionality and has sets of instructions on how to boot from your storage. Computers are really just many many layers of abstraction. Separating the abstractions into layers gets pretty complex. But if you create a virtual OS inside of your storage device’s OS, it is its own OS. It has no knowledge that it’s a virtual machine.

    • @christophski@feddit.uk
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      16 months ago

      If you asked somebody which operating system they were using they would say Linux or Windows etc. The BIOS is not part of these.

        • @PixxlMan@lemmy.world
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          47 months ago

          That’s not what operating system means. In fact, you do not need one. You can run programs directly on the bare metal, it’s just really difficult too coordinate tasks that way.