Originally Posted by
P.Pilcher
Well, no doubt I'm totally wrong, but I thought that the BIOS was only active on its own for the first few seconds after the computer is switched on.
Yes, but when your computer takes 20 seconds to boot from the BIOS to being logged in and usable, the additional 10 seconds the BIOS takes is a serious problem. It's a few months since I timed the startup of my HTPC, but I believe that's approximately the numbers I measured.
Of course it's not a problem with the average OEM Windows installation, when it takes two minutes to load all the crapware and become usable after logging in
.