Getting more than you paid for again:
"A batch of laptops pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium was found to have been infected with a 13-year-old boot sector virus."
"According to Virus Bulletin, the consignment of infected Medion laptops ? which could number anything up to 100,000 shipments ? had been sold in Danish and German branches of retail giant Aldi."
Still swallowing any old bollocks spouted by company droids, eh Dribble?
Oh, the irony.
And most amusing that you don't understand why this event is a bad thing. Still what do people expect when they run a s**te old system dependent on a BIOS?
A question oft asked of your posts.
Please eff off.
The question is which piece of software is the infection. The boot sector virus may be harmless, but the rest of it.....
Juz luv this type of comment - as if the author could, at the drop of a hat, write a better one. But of course "he never does have the time". da da-da da da da daaaaaaa.
Please eff off as you are a total waste of space.
QED.
Please eff off as you are a total waste of space.
...
Nice one!
Mary
Be fair. According to Symantec (who have NO interest in down-playing any virus), "Damage Level : Low", and they don't mention any destructive payload.
What do you use that doesn't? (That's a serious question - I am interested). I also would have thought that any architecture that uses an operating system which is stored on disk must be vunerable to a virus rewriting the well known location from which the initial ROM reads the operating system.
The Clue is in the header, but to spell it out, I use OSX, althugh that's simply one of several operating systems that have no use for the PC BIOS. The basic input/output system used is Intel's EFI, which Microsoft should support, but for reasons of the usual Microsoft fuckwittery, don't.
Only if the operating system is lame enough to permit software run in user space to rewrite parts of the OS. Or if like Microsoft products they are lame enough to require users to run all software as administrators if they expect to get any work done.
I love your sort of comment that shows that you know f*ck-all but like to pretend to knowledge that you don't have.
Oh right. You meant "BIOS" as in "IBM-PC Compatible BIOS" rather than an arbitrary basic input/output system.
Yeah I guess I had forgotten LOGIO and PHYSIO privileges.
There's no such thing. Not all the world is a Wintel PC, you know.
The reason they don't use efi is because they load their own BIOS as part of the OS, just like freebsd and linux do. Using efi may make it easier for the OS designer but it makes the os dependent on the ROM contents on the machine. Its somewhat easier to load the OSes own BIOS into RAM. Strange as it may seem I think you will find OSX also loads its drivers into RAM and bypasses EFI after booting too. This is because the OS then knows it has the latest and also because stuff runs a lot faster from RAM than from ROM on nearly evey machine. BTW if you are a hardware supplier and you do use efi do you compile it to run as 16,32 or 64 bit and which OSes wouldn't work if you used 64 bit? If you don't compile it for 64bit how does the OS work?
Which M$ products require that? Any OS in the last 6 years? If you needed to run as admin then you didn't know how to use windows.
Please define the 'BIOS' that is loaded by these systems.
I think all EFI-bootable OS's do this. Just the same as all BIOS-bootable OS's (except DOS maybe?) don't use the BIOS calls after booting. (Due to non-use by any mainstream OS, the 32 bit BIOS calls were too buggy to be usable, and AFAIK there never were any 64 bit BIOS calls defined.)
EFI is dead -- there will be no more new EFI systems introduced since all the parties agreed on UEFI a year or more ago. It was looking likely that UEFI would only directly support 64bit OS's, and provide a leagacy BIOS mode booting for anything else. That's what Microsoft and a number of the other parties were suggesting, without any noticable disagreement from anyone else. I don't think anything in UEFI prevents 16 and 32 bit support, except it looks like no one will be providing any 16 or 32 bit drivers for it on the basis that all current hardware and all mainstream OS's are now 64 bit capable, and anything that isn't probably also has dependancies on leagacy BIOS booting. However, I've been out of the loop for a while now and things may have moved on.
The kernel device drivers. They drive the hardware directly, not via the BIOS calls which are provided for that purpose.
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