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Windows 8 ditches '80s BIOS boot for streamline UEFI
Every time we reboot our computers, that scrolling code takes us right back to the days of War Games and Tab. Bringing us into the 21st century, Microsoft has decided to ditch the old boot by beautifying the whole experience with a graphical menu. Windows 8 will shift from the standard fugly BIOS system to a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) -- giving users a high resolution logo and a graphical menu to gaze upon while powering up their PC. Besides just looking better, the menu lets you boot to a different disc, OS or USB drive using pretty pictures and words as prompts. If you're into a little self-inflicted eye torture, you can always pull up the command prompt menu from nightmares past. Check out the throwback video tribute to the computers of yesteryear after the break. Update: Just to clarify, Microsoft isn't actually building flashing mobos, but it's pushing towards UEFI to achieve "significantly richer capabilities" while booting. Update: Microsoft isn't actually building flashing mobos, but it's using its considerable industry weight to push manufacturers towards UEFI to achieve "significantly richer capabilities" while booting.
Mac 101: Boot options
We've had some questions recently on Ask TUAW about boot options so I thought it would make for a good Mac 101. Obviously, Boot Camp has brought dual-booting to the fore on the Mac platform, but there are actually a variety of boot time options built into your Mac which allow you to interact with it to some degree before loading the OS. The most important of these, of course, is choosing the boot partition and this is easily done by holding down the option (???) key after restarting the machine. This will bring up a menu of all bootable volumes (such as a Windows Boot Camp partition), including mounted external USB and FireWire drives as well as optical discs. However, there are more handy shortcuts as well: You can force OS X to boot from a mounted optical disc by holding down the C key. Holding down the T key will put that Mac into FireWire Target disk mode, which will allow another Mac to access its hard drive over a FireWire cable as if it were an external hard drive. Holding down the Shift key will boot into Safe Mode, which can be very useful if your Mac is misbehaving. Apple has a nice list of a few more boot time key combos that are worth keeping in mind.
