How does UEFI differ from traditional BIOS?

UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, provides several advancements over traditional BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), one of the most significant being its support for secure boot. Secure boot is a security standard that ensures a device boots using only software that is trusted by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). This feature helps protect the system from various types of malware that may attempt to load during the boot process, ensuring that the software running on the hardware is legitimate and unaltered.

In contrast, traditional BIOS does not have a secure boot feature, which leaves systems more vulnerable to certain types of attacks and unauthorized modifications during startup. The introduction of secure boot in UEFI is an important step in enhancing the security posture of modern computing systems, making it a crucial difference between UEFI and traditional BIOS.

Choosing UEFI over traditional BIOS is not solely about having a text-based interface or managing larger drives—it’s fundamentally about providing a more secure and flexible boot environment. Moreover, while some traditional BIOS may boot quickly, UEFI often benefits from a faster initialization process, but it is primarily the security features, like secure boot, that represent a significant enhancement in this newer technology.