Top result on Google too
used to be worse way back in the day before reddit. you’d search and search for your issue, come across some random php board you’ve never been to before because SOMEONE had your EXACT issue. going through the thread and the last post was always “thanks I figured it out” and 8 times out of 10 that account was deleted. they had the knowledge, they took it with them and held it close.
Now with things like lemmy/piefed, reddit, stackoverflow, and LLMs people are spoiled.
“Now with things like lemmy/piefed, reddit, stackoverflow, and LLMs people are spoiled.”
But we were kind of spoiled back then as well. Before that option we had even less to figure it out. Relying on support to assist was the best option and that always sucked. Figuring it out yourself or come up with some workaround was generally the only option you had sadly.
For anyone who is asking, yeah, I figured it out.
<del> key
Yeah if Delete Key doesn’t work then one of the F Keys, like F1, F2, F8, or F10.
Once I worked on a machine which didnt output any visuals during boot menu so I just monkeyed around with ups and downs and enters until I got it to boot from different media.
Ah the joys of tech debt.
1970s: Hardware configuration settings? All the chips are soldered down, there’s a port for a floppy drive and a port for a cassette drive. Write your software for the peripherals it needs.
Early 80s: So there are some expansion slots in the case, and a bank of 12 tiny DIP switches on the motherboard to set the configuration. Most of what it needs to know is how much RAM is installed.
Mid 80s: The computer comes with a diskette that has a program on it that will allow you to set the configuration in software, it’ll be stored in battery backed RAM in the RTC circuit.
Late 80s: We’re building that configuration UI into the firmware itself so you don’t need separate software. You can enter the BIOS config menu by pressing the F11 key before the OS boots.
Early 90s: F11? I thought it was F12!
Mid 90s: The company I bought my desktop from also makes compact laptops that don’t have a hardware F11 or F12 key, Those are Fn+F1 and Fn+F2, and the Fn key doesn’t work in the BIOS because it was implemented as an OS feature. So they use F2, and they use it on all the computers they make so they don’t have to maintain a special branch of the BIOS.
Late 90s: Okay so this is getting more important because we don’t just have two floppies and a hard drive now; “Try booting from A, Try booting from B, Try booting from C” starts to break when computers might have more than one hard drive and possibly more than one optical drive. We’re going to need to make that configurable.
Early 2000s: The old BIOS standard is starting to get long in the tooth, we’re basically shipping firmware designed 20 years ago. It needs a refresh called UEFI.
Mid 2000s: As part of that new standard, we’re going to standardize the key to enter the firmware config menu right? Right?!
Late 2000s: Our multimedia PC maps the function keys to media keys by default and you have to hold the fn key to actually throw an F1 through F12 keypress. Again that doesn’t work outside of Windows so we use the Delete key.
Early 10s: Booting from USB flash drives is a thing now, the whole drive is removable so there’s no realistic way to put “boot from USB drive” permanently ahead of the hard drive in the boot order, it would be handy to have a separate menu just to temporarily choose which drive to boot from. Since we use F11 for the settings menu, we’ll use F2 for the boot menu.
Mid 10s: We use F8 for that.
Late 10s: Hey, we could speed up boot times if we significantly shortened the duration during boot when its waiting for the user to do that, and print the instructions to the screen for less time than it takes to read.
Early 20s: What if we let you disable that menu entirely from within that menu, for the sake of skipping that delay entirely? Which also means you can’t get back into the menu to re-enable it?
Mid 20s: What if nobody could ever afford computers again? Wouldn’t that be fun?
This was very illuminating, as someone who’s wondered for a good while. Could someone direct me to resources that further contextualize the details about how this stayed so non-standardized for so long(with no solution in immediate sight?)
As a former legacy BIOS and UEFI developer, who has also done a ton of basic IT support… thank you, I am now having traumatic flashbacks (and I even had access to the firmware code! But that’s not always enough… Never enough.)
These days I can’t even very leftover prototypes to use, dang.
[]gets used on some systems too.Yeah I was pressing all the f-keys and nothing.
Smashing the del key a dozen times finally worked
Also in windows reboot, don’t shut down.
Windows defaults to quick startup which hibernates the kernel. So your PC is technically in hibernation and you don’t want to mess with bios settings when it’s in that mode. Some bioses dgaf, some are smart enough to know the difference, and some just say “nah”.
You can also just turn off fast boot if that’s annoying. On an SSD the difference isn’t that much. But on an HDD it halved my boot time back on windows 8.
If you are on windows 11 (maybe 10 as well?) my easiest way to get there these days is hold shift when clicking restart.
There was once a day you also did not know this information.
yes, but manuals existed and the boot screen almost always told you in plain text. problem is that people just want to be told answers, and they dont read manuals or their monitors anymore.
People love to throw out useful manuals the moment they see them. At least make a note of the model number somewhere so you can search for the manual later!
I can understand throwing out manuals, I do that too, but when people ask for help about something that they can read, on their screen right in front of them, right now at this particular moment that you’re trying to ask me about it -
That’s usually when I get a little grumpy about it.
My wife did that once, many, many years ago, when we first got together. A message appeared on her computer, she just clicked it away and said it wasn’t working. I saw her do it, and asked her what it said. She got the message to appear again, and it said it needed to restart.
She’s become an avid troubleshooter after years of training 🤓
This is why you read the manual.
It is on the cdrom and I do not have an optical drive.
Lol same. Mine didn’t even come with a CD or manual.
RTFM
Rotating Transformer From Mars
