Quick Start, Episode 7: Crimes... And Felonies. 

(Spoilers below) I would like to note that after publishing the video I've spoken to one firmware engineer, and read about a dozen posts from another (Matthew Garrett), and my takeaway is: no, the SMM has _not_ been left alone as it should be, it _has_ been leveraged for a bunch of reprehensible hacks by vendors who didn't want to do things the right way. But nothing on this level that I'm aware of. When I said "corporate bullshit," I was referring to _what we see here,_ stuff in the vein of advertising, not solutions to some kind of genuine problem, and I don't _think_ the SMM's been abused for that. But honestly, at this point, nothing would shock me.

Your explanation at the end perfectly explains why every company remotely related to technology has shoved “AI” into their products: it’s the only thing they had left to add.

The idea of some CEO lugging around all his outlook data in unencrypted XML files in some random FAT32 partition is pretty funny to me

The delta between the technical wizardry and tolerance for stupid, unneeded risk needed to pull off such a hack and the thing they used these things for is... stunning. It's like hacking the Pentagon to increase the default size of the mouse pointer. I love it.

As someone that works at HP the whole rant about an executive firing everyone until they find someone that blurs out the worst idea possible, it's soooo true! hahahahahaha

The reveals in this series are scarier than any Black Mirror episode

"Looked like a BOX for a GeForce 4." My god, perfect, accurate description. What was it with early 2000s computer marketing design, like what a wild time.

"HP put DayStarter in the goddamned System Management Mode." That's a bucket of ice water to the face if I've ever heard one.

“Bob is in hell, and he’s making it your problem.” Absolutely sent me.

I'm sending the last 10 minutes to everyone who asks me why I'm so grumpy about tech because you just articulated what I've been trying to say for like 5 years.

Listening to your point about middle management unsolving problems while I was at work scanning copies of pen and paper quarterly count sheets so my manager can manually input them felt awfully prophetic.

HP DayStarter is kinda like changing the laws of the universe to make your kettle boil 10 seconds faster. A show of eldritch power harnessed for an innocuous and very pointless purpose.

Halfway through: "hah, this HP laptop is a silly hack!" At the end: "AND THAT'S WHY WE MUST DESTROY CAPITALISM! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!" Best tech video ever.

Been a while since I laughed as hard as when you said "SMM". Wonderful, a rootkit that displays a calendar. Nothing could ever possibly go wrong with this.

I didn't expect a video about a calendar viewer to be such a roller coaster of emotions. At one moment we're looking at a cute little UEFI app and getting fascinated by some seemingly impossible computer wizardry and the next moment we're feeling resentment over how this wizardry was achieved before finally getting hit with the ennui of late stage capitalism.

"If someone were to sneak malware into these components" Given this laptop was marketed to executives, and all you would need is a JPEG parsing vulnerability in the Daystarter SMM code... I'm sure someone did. Someone who works for a 3 letter agency (or the equivalent in other alphabets)

The rant at the end was worth the whole watchtime. It reminded me of a rant Technology Connections made about toaster companies and why we can never expect innovative toasters ever again. Seems like the real boot-time-speedup was the executive bonuses we met along the way. Regarding the pop-up at 50:48, I'd love to see a video on what you think PCs could and should be.

I distinctly remember changing the boot splash of my Windows ME PC to very low quality pictures of Sonic. A turbonerd was born that day.

Dang that rant is 🌶. Solid, and spoken in the language of tech, a dialect so rarely interested in delivering rants that aren't 100% capital-L Libertarian. Great writing!

Oh god. I just paused the game I was playing when CRD said it was running on the SMM shouted out "NO!" and sat here for a moment in shock. I felt some tears starting to build from the horror.

This is the best rant I've heard in quite a while.

I'll be completely honest, the entire back half explanation/rant is exactly why I stay in gamedev despite the bullshit. At least it's a _chance_ to work on something novel or new.

This video plus Ross Scott on the first Deus Ex is basically a complete summary of modern society. I never expected that a video about an old video game and a video about an old computer would explain how things are better than anything I’ve ever read, but here we are I guess. Excellent work, Gravis.

There's a reason our former custodian was using his 1970s-era Hoover vacuum cleaner until the day he retired. It was easy to fix, consumable and service parts were widely available everywhere, and it's solidly made. I think he left behind four or five NIB vacuum cleaners sitting in store room as backups that he never needed. I'm pretty sure he took it home with him when he retired. 😄

mbox-over-xml is by itself at least 60% of the total hell-world quota of this entire video.

UEFI was already available as a thing by 2003 for the x86 platform, but at that point it was universally only used by server systems. If HP had switched their laptops to UEFI then, and implemented QuickLook at the time of the first Centrino CPUs, this would have been amazing. But as you said, by 2010, it was nearly unnecessary.

On the question of is EFI an operating system, I personally consider EFI to be an evolution of DOS - It's a single-tasking, complete-access-to-the-hardware OS that's cooked into the hardware. For fun, grab yourself an EFI Shell application. The 'map' command will show you the recognized filesystems. They're accessed with DOS-like notation - FS0: for the first filesystem, FS1: for the second filesystem, etc. dir to show the contents. cd \ or cd\[whatever] to change working directory. EFI is very DOS-like, albeit much more fully developed and functional for modern systems and requirements.

As someone who works in information security, and spent many years in firmware security with a focus in UEFI. I was screaming multiple times in this video. Somehow, HP did QuickLook right. Everything else? 😱 I should note - a UEFI NTFS driver is considered to be a sign of firmware-level infection. Firmware monitoring utilities will throw a holy fit if they see an NTFS driver in UEFI, it’s considered such a terrible idea. That’s one thing HP did right by keeping everything on FAT32. The other is signing the UEFI binary. Frighteningly, major motherboard vendors have had UEFI that doesn’t require signed executables as recently as 2021. (HP thankfully is not one of those.)

doing shit that sounds like the way you'd design an NSA backdoor into something to make a calendar app load 10 seconds faster has been such a bizarre recurring theme of this series.

About that rant: I sometimes say the same thing about software. Especially software that's been around for a long time, like MS Office. It's just done. It was done 15 years ago. There is no feature that you could reasonably want from an office suite, that wasn't in MS Office 15 years ago. It's just done, complete, finished. All they had to do, is release security patches, bugfixes, maybe some packs with effects and such, and improve compatibility with newer Windowses. The only reason you might be using a laterly built feature, is because either Microsoft or your boss is telling you to. Something like cloud storage. This could easily have been an addon to Office XP.

Industrial Design undergrad here: You have simultaneously summed up all my grimmest takeaways from the consumer electronics industry and given a face to all the malaise. Wrestling with questions like "Where can we actually improve here?" keeps me up on the best of days. The answer is almost always: "We already arrived at the ideal solution decades ago and cut off all the corners since." Endlessly frustrating, depressing, yet invigorating (for me) to actually advocate for individual expression and tailored solutions, broad appeal and maximized efficiency be damned. You have an uncanny knack for getting to the bottom of problems in modern product design and putting my curriculum to shame. New designers entering fields with no experience and no historical context don't make better designs, they make hastily thrown-together retreads that lack endurance and sacrifice good, tried-and-true features for trends for trends' sake AND wacky garbage that blindly breaks good convention for no good reason. Sincerely, thank you for singlehandedly dismantling my entire career choice.

To try to be fair, QuickLook has *some* value: When I worked for the government in the late 2000s, our computers were so loaded up with things that it took a full actual 45 minutes to reach a usable state. And we were required to shut down the machine (not sleep, but fully off) every night before going home, so everyone had a full 45 minutes of unproductive time every single morning. So having a reminder of a meeting coming up in that 45 minute window would actually have been useful.

The logical extension of this is Unified Kernel Images (UKI) for Linux. You can now take your Linux kernel and initrd and pack it into a single EFI executable. You can put whatever you want in the initrd, so if you wanted you could have a fully functional graphical Linux system that boots from a single EFI executable.

"Manufacturers are shaking up things that are already fine the way they were, simply because Bob needs a bonus." Ahh, enshittification.

(FOR NEW REPLIERS: This was made during the Patreon pre-release!) Okay. Quick suggestion. At 32:41, where you do that whole "Welcome to Quick Start" bit, I was expecting some kind of logo cut that completely reframes the last 30 minutes as a cold-open. After reading the Patreon post the first half of the episode gave what I can only describe as the "vibe callback", "that thing some video games do near the end where they briefly revisit a location/vibe from the start" That'd be fun if it were doable but it also may be too much, but I figure screw it, I'll throw it out there (Edit: Ahh, no dice! I think it hits plenty well anyways, I'm glad you found it amusing at least. :) Also means it didn't need a re-edit, which is nice. \o/)

Everything you're saying about Bob Needs A Bonus Logic (tm) I 100% agree with, but the one thing I'm certain of from watching this series is that all the engineers tasked with making these ridiculous things to get Bob his bonus, very likely took up the challenge and tried their damndest to make the best thing they could with the ridiculous limitations placed upon them. If anything, because of the stagnant nature of the PC industry, I bet some of these engineers were even excited to be tasked with coming up with an out of the box idea, even if it was frequently a security hole you could drive a road train through. Every one of these, I've looked at them and gone "This sucked but dammit guys, you tried your best!" and I will at least give kudos for that.

On the rant at the end: Companies like HP competing in a saturated market arent (usually) trying to differentiate themselves by showing you solutions to problems that don't exist. That stuff is just to stand out at trade shows. What they really do is sell you the jellybeans. And a jellybean dispenser. And the jellybean dispenser chute cleaner. And a stale jellybean buyback plan. All from one place so you can set up and manage a hundred jellybean dispensers at your tricounty area pizza time and fun palaces. This why HP and Dell seem to spend 90% of their energy catering to the needs of large businesses. HP and Dell compete by buying up related tech needs to sell to you as a bundle with a discount. This is why Dell bought VMWare, and HP bought uh... everything 😅

This is probably my favorite episode of Quick Start yet, and that rant at the end had me screaming at my computer with joy that finally someone understands my exact struggles with living in today's technological climate. Thoroughly amazing from start to finish, bravo!

DayStarter is quite possibly the most cursed computer program I've ever seen

amazing video! I absolutely love the whole "digging closer to hell" vibe that the bit about permission rings gets into, you've got an *incredibly* evocative way of writing / talking about the closer-to-metal aspects of modern computing!

That whole part of the rant about power is entirely on-point, I bought my laptop a full DECADE ago and other than ditching the failed hard drive for an SSD, it still runs just as well as it did 10 years ago - better, actually, since it came off the line with Windows 8.1 and a 5400rpm drive instead of an unregistered copy of Win10 Pro and a cheap SATA solid-state. It's got an i7 of some generation or other, and a Geforce card of some kind, with 8 gigs of RAM, and that's perfectly cromulent for running everything it did when I bought it. Similarly, my mid-tier gaming desktop was built 2 years later and other than replacing the failed Western Digital 7200 with yet another cheap SSD upgrade a few years back and throwing an extra stick of RAM in it so I could run Davinci Resolve without thrashing the swap file, it still runs everything including current-gen games at entirely-usable settings. There's really nowhere to go from here, like, I COULD upgrade to a 4k monitor which WOULD need a newer GPU to run games at decent specs and framerates, but why would I do that? It's not like my internet can handle 4k video anyway and 1080p is perfectly fine in a 23" monitor which is the biggest that fits into the shelf alcove of my desk, games run fine at this resolution on the current card, and why spend hundreds of dollars on a monitor that looks very marginally better in very specific circumstances when I can just get another 23" 1080p monitor at Goodwill for less than the price of a Big Mac if this one dies? Hell, I still HAVE several more of these just kinda lying around, I've literally pulled em outta the trash before. The gains over the last decade or so have been marginal at the best of times and are really just nitpicky things that only apply to you if you're either running $150 Black Friday Special craptops that break a hinge every 6 months and get binned, or are trying to run the newest, bestest AAA game titles at the best possible quality and would rather rebuild your entire PC setup for the price of a runs-and-drives 2008 Nissan Altima instead of just sticking an ex-miner GPU in it or buying a lightly used Playstation 5, both of which would cost about 2 trips to the grocery store once you discover Ebay. Hardware vendors are all pushing the "latest and greatest" when there's really no reason to upgrade, and the sole reason the Big 3 semiconductor companies have stayed afloat THIS long is cause of cryptocurrency scams and this latest AI craze. Hell, the only reason CELL PHONES even need upgraded is cause they stop getting updates, and with modern apps the TLC flash they abuse for the system cache starts to get corrupted after about 3-5 years of hard use, so they just kinda bootloop and die every few years - so you buy another $70 refurbished low-mid-tier phone and run it for another few years.

Pausing the boot process was one of the most horrific computing oddities I have ever seen. It’s bloody sacrilege. Also these “features” copying personal information into a secondary separate partition is truly stupidly bold because they might easily be leaking encrypted information into clear text. I don’t imagine there is a way for these EFI apps or SMM hacks to read from an encrypted drive, so I can see a scenario where an IT dept sets the puter up with Bitlocker but then the end user enables this feature and bam, encrypted mail and calendar data are now sitting in very inviting XML as clear text, on a FAT32 partition. Now imagine if that computer was stolen, and data leaked, thats an expensive lawsuit time bomb for HP. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy them getting shafted… but it’s such an unnecessary risk both for the customers and the company, it’s mind boggling.

"There are good engineers at HP." Yeah, in the "write viruses for ink cartridges so we can force people to subscribe to get new ones every month" department.

As a thought on how Daystar could have worked, it doesn't *have* to be a heuristic - The Windows Boot Manager loads the OEM logo from a known location in the UEFI ROM. Daystar *could* have used the MMU to hook a debugging interrupt when that location is read, like a regular CPU debugger watching a memory location. When that location is read, the Daystar code gets an interrupt letting them know Windows is displaying it's boot splash, and it can do its interception of the video code, essentially clearing the frame buffer, /dev/null'ing windows' attempts to write to the display, and instead writing its own to the screen instead. I don't know for certain, but it's possible the Windows Boot Manager reads the OEM logo each frame, so the Daystar image keeps being sent until Windows Boot Manager stops trying to display the logo. It's also possible this could be abused by a UEFI by replacing the image at that location each time it's read to make an animated boot logo. It would also be worth it as a joke trying to read from the OEM splash logo in Windows and seeing if the display corrupts as Daystar tries to overwrite the screen...

20 years ago HP was bungling Itanium, their, and Intel's, attempt to improve the CPU that didn't work out, it depended on the compiler being able to optimize the code to run as fast as possible with certain instructions bundled together to run at the same time and that compiler didn't happen. It was IA-64. Itanium sank Compaq and SGI, among other companies, which were later bought by HP. EFI was a side effect of that project.

Learning that rings below ring zero exist is like one of those iceberg memes, except it's existentially terrifying.

What an amazing horrifying look into the abyss! Your analogy with the vacuum cleaners was dead on, all modern ones are terrible because making a good one is a solved problem so the only way to "beat" the competition is on price, and you do that by drifting away from the solved ideal through cost cutting and bullshit features designed to hoodwink the consumer (or exploit the financially restricted ones trying to get the most value they can) on buying a terrible product that they will throw out when it breaks in disgust to go buy a different disappointment lured in by its price and hype

Oh, it's an *abomination*, I love it! These things you're digging up are like the cryptids of software

I know a method to pause the boot process in theory, and it's one you can even do on a MOS 6502 (I should know, because I've written code to explicitly do this on a MOS 6502). I'm not saying this is what HP did, but it's the first thing springs to my mind. Windows is taking over the processor to boot. When you pause you will be halting the processor; straight up issuing a BRK instruction. However, day planner will be running in an interrupt and even if the main processor task is halted an interrupt being triggered will still cause the program pointer to jump to the interrupt code, execute, and return from interrupt to it's halted state. To resume, just tell the processor to continue execution. Have you ever seen your computer completely lock up but you can still move the mouse cursor? Same thing. Mouse input is handled via an interrupt and the operating system scheduler outside of interrupt has halted the processor. EDIT: HA! I should've just watched the video for a couple extra minutes. Yup! It's running in interrupt (SMI). If there is enough evidence out there to say it *might* be running in interrupt, then it absolutely is running in interrupt. EDIT 2: My Managing Director literally said to the development team "we need to introduce AI into our marketing" and everyone, even the CTO, died a little inside. It's why every website and product in less than a few months now has "AI!" on the proverbial box; Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist, especially the way people envision it and that is VERY true of almost any company who slaps it all over their website. When you type in that search box, you aren't invoking some magical AI, you're contacting AWS Elastisearch, which is the Amazon implementation of Elastisearch that first came out in 2010, which itself is based on Lucene that came out in 1999, which is based on the Vector Space Model first described in *1962*. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and (at least consumer) technology since then has been profoundly boring. We've reached the end-game.

This is absolutely Prime CRD. You have really taken me on an emotional journey with your perfectly executed rant. Keep up the great work, sir!

Man.. you explaining HP DayStarter brought me more joy and laughs than most modern comedy. thank you. I love this series with all my heart. I remember a lot of these machines as they were in use while I was working in PC Sales/Service, these features were always fascinating to me.

On the rant at the end - my home lab virtual machine server is a laptop from 2011. It was a high-end laptop, sure. And it has maxed RAM and dual SSDs from 2017. But at its heart, it’s a laptop from 2011. Heck, its CPU wasn’t even seriously outmatched until 2018. It’s one of the earliest quad core laptops, but quad core was still as good as you could get in a laptop until pretty recently, and is still perfectly normal. And it does its job great. It runs 4-6 VMs of various OSes at the same time, including some RAM-intensive stuff. If it wasn’t for games, my primary Windows desktop would still be a Core 2 Quad with Radeon 5000-series.

I loved the rant at the end. Probably my favorite Quick Start video yet.

HP also made 11.6" models of some of their line-up and they were the only netbooks worth using, because they at least had U-suffix core processors and not those lousy atom things, which had less processing power than a clipped toe nail.

Bravo. Absolutely wonderfully essential rant. This applies to almost everything made in the last 5-10 years. It's all been done, and somebody just wants to see more spit polish on plastic.

Love that Capstone shirt. They are the pinnacle of computer entertainment 😂

For what it's worth I would quite happily listen to you just grumbling about daft trends in capitalism but the computer stuff is also welcome too! You do have me wondering if we'll ever get to a point where the "innovation" obsession just dies and as a society we can just make stuff we know works and is reliable and good at what it does, and ideally doesn't need replacing every five minutes, and find literally anything else to do with our lives except work to make and sell disposable crap so we can afford to buy disposable crap. Does seem like a very post-capitlist thing though, hard to imagine it happening as things are now.

I don't know what it says about me that I was like, oh yeah, you could do that with SMM when you showed that you could press a key. I don't know why I wasn't immediately horrified until you pointed out how absolutely horrifying it is :)

These series never cease to amaze me with how much work and imagination is put into making these trivial and useless features work, and then they seem to faceplant on the finish straight. I feel many of them could be made pretty usable with a bit more polishing and features on the software itself, but it feels like they are shipped as a proof of concept and then immediately forgotten. It's like going through the effort of engineering a whole car and then only adding the controls for driving backwards and turning left.

i'm not done watching this yet but this is great also i hope the "though legally distinct" clip gets used in other videos. it's good. it made me laugh. i hope there's no attempt at outfit continuity when using the clip. ...this may be funny to only us but uh. yeah lmao.

When you mentioned the three power buttons that launch three separate OSs, my partner immediately said "one OS always tells the truth, another always tells lies..."

I actually think a 'Splash Screen automatically updates with calendar and upcoming events' program would be useful, just not a Ring -2 one, holy moly.

Your last theory made me realize that's the very reason my laptop CPU was frying itself while gaming. For some years now it has been the a normal thing having auto overclock on certain conditions like load, temperature limits, power draw, battery and so on. Is it really necessary? Not really, but sometimes a speed bump is appreciated and that's how turbo modes came to be. But it has been out of control lately and following your theory I assume is because Bob needs to show every year how much bester they can make Asus laptops in this case. And more GHZs mean more speed and more speed means bester laptop, so they activate turbo mode by default with a super aggresive profile that goes beyond the CPU maker recomendations even if it's within spec but also you can't disable or tinker it in the BIOS because the Apple brainworm has infected every hardware maker. Sometimes a saint appears and codes a program that lets you manage power states and voltages through Windows, but I couldn't find any for my laptop configuration. So I had to add a value in the registry to unlock a hidden config in energy setting to disable Windows from turboing the CPU when what I really wanted was to control the temp limit and do some undervolting. At least my CPU doesn't go to 90Cº anymore because of D2R and stays at a comfy 70º. Thanks Asus, I hate it.

"Look like the box for a GeForce 4" *shows the box for a radeon card* Masterful gambit sir

15:30: OK, I got one for you. Literally every spotty or nonexistent data connection ever, be it airplane mode to being in a Faraday cage of a cavernous concrete building, to "I just don't have a dataplan because I'm in Nebraska and nobody has signal in Nebraska if they're not not on wifi" situations. And this is a pet peeve of mine: ALL PHONE APPS MUST WORK RELIABLY OFFLINE just feels obvious. "Synchronize shit, even if it's hard" is something POP3 clients did, so I'm not super interested in excuses when a fediverse client or navigation app or chat program can't do it. Cool, give me what you already got, let me queue up stuff so it goes out later, do what you can when you get a connection in the background.

You'll be pleased to note that the preroll ad for this video was for Dyson

"I'm sorry this video ended up being an hour of me talking-" THAT'S WHY WE'RE HERE, GRAVIS. THAT'S WHY WE WATCH YOUR VIDEOS. TO HEAR YOU TALK FROM A POSITION OF EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH.

I’ve been struggling to articulate my feelings on the state of technology, but your end rant captures it exactly

"Bob is in hell, and he's making it your problem." The corporate world in a nutshell. I figured when you hit pause that there was some level of hijacking going on but holy shit that's bad.

This is like my WearOS watch that shows the time during bootup, but it boots up so fast that this is only visible for a second before the actual UI gets shown. Also, if you are wondering what HP engineers do nowadays, I've recently seen their new full-sized desktop keyboard. They removed the scroll lock light, removed the right windows button (and made the right alt, menu and right ctrl very wide), and did some moving around of the print screen, scroll lock and pause keys to confuse people.

This video turning into 15 minutes on how capitalism is literally backwards at the end made me very happy

I can almost imagine this as an scene from Star Trek: "Captain, I have something here." "What is it lieutenant?" "No... it can't be... it's running directly off the motherboard." "You're saying it's running alongside the bios?" "No, sir. It IS the bios" (MUSICAL STINGER, CUT TO COMMERCIAL)

that lcd has seen better days

32:27 I gasped audibly and clutched my hand to my chest in shock, horror, and disgust. Had to pause in order to comment; now eagerly(?) looking forward to the explanation of this atrocity! Update: 37:27 I let out an "oh, f$ck..." because I know *exactly* what that means. Wow.

Here's my theory: HP was heavily involved in developing EFI to begin with (remember their sad and contractual devotion to the Itanium...) so they definitely knew how to mess with it. It's also quite possible that someone that worked on Windows 7 ended up at HP making the whole process a bit easier. So a couple of guys with the know how came up with this idea and installed it on their slow AF desktop that HP wouldn't replace to look at their schedule while they booted. Then some middle manager passed by, glanced at it, asked the guys about it, and despite the guys telling him that this was NOT SAFE he started a crusade to have this included in the next laptop to get a bonus. Tada!

Good god was this a terrific video, fell off my chair with those reveals. And with that final speech I think you hit the nail on the head so well. I've come to the same conclusion about smartphones four years ago: we have managed to produce SoCs that can do everything one user could ask for, but they get deprecated and replaced by overkill shit, while most people that can't afford a >300 usd handset will have to buy literal landfill, which chips that were outdated from the moment they were fabbed. It's living in a cuckoo world to have companies touting sustainability and climate targets while producing so much utter waste, and it's not like making products that were worth it was that much higher; they would really just shoot themselves in the face if they didn't have a promised upgrade cycle. Though we see the post "USP" world in automotive already today. Corporate consolidations and agreed upon platform-sharing, on top of (as you stated) most of the work being done by parts OEMs (BOSCH designed most of the Fiat 500e, by the way) makes every car even less distinctive than before. An Opel, Dodge, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, or Peugeot can share the same whole stuff underneath, with a bunch of parts developed 20 years ago, because developing different stuff for each model would be prohibitively expensive due to emissions constraints. And so much of the complexity goes away with the move to EVs. So the entire play now is connected vehicles, subscription services, and leasing. Welcome to hell

"Put it system management mode" lolololol.... I knew the email thing was EFI from the get go but I never would have imagined someone doing a full program of any kind in SMM.

What a wild ride, and as you said at the end, we hardly looked at the PC at all! I am in the lower-middle of "knowing things about computers" and when you said it pauses the boot process, I shook in fear. Is this more or less heinous than running 2 OS-es at once in separate halves of ram?

I've been needing a way to burn an hour while waiting for my guitar to arrive in the mail, so this was possibly the best way to do so, because it actually kept my attention for the entirety of said hour.

47:18 I think what happens at that point is that competition starts making up issues, consumers get a worse product than before until someone realizes "how about we just make a damn vacuum cleaner that just sucks?" and the cycle repeats. I believe we're in an intermediary stage when it comes to consumer laptops, where they don't really include insane features anymore and manufacturers are slowly but surely gonna start making good, solid laptops again(I'm thinking old ThinkPad quality and upgrade-ability and shit).

HP will never recover from the last 15 minutes of this video

I loudly screamed “No!” When you mentioned SMM. Also, I understand the reason such a thing exists but the concept of something that can override the kernel and ignore NMIs is vaguely terrifying.

That 2nd theory at the end and rant about technology was absolutely priceless. Hats off my brother, spit yo shit indeed 💪

Makes me wonder how hard it would be for malware to place a malformed jpeg in the tools drive and just wait for it to crash hp’s software and do the simplest and most powerful privilege escalation of the century

When I first saw DayStarter in this video, I thought, "Oh, they customized the boot screen. Kind of weird, and I can see how that might be fragile because you aren't supposed to do that, but it's probably mostly harmless," and I thought about it for a bit and figured that probably the worst thing that might happen is Windows reverting it to the normal boot screen. Then, when you pointed out that it has a user interface later in the video, I swear I shouted "NO!" at the screen. This is somehow even more of an ungodly hack than Phoenix Hyperspace, and all of this just to render a calendar during boot time? Wow. Honestly, I'm shocked anyone even bothered to implement something like this. This clearly took a lot of effort, and I really do have to wonder how fragile it is, but what gets me is that the end result doesn't seem like it would be useful to anyone, especially since it's only on screen for a matter of seconds, and let's face it, I doubt *any* end users ever paused the thing, except perhaps out of curiosity.

I love the wording of "this is a bad way to use the computer, dont do it"

Thank you so much for just being great.Being the way you are with these long videos about the most obscure tech no one would care about .Yet I do watch them,thnks to you.

Can you please upload the "But why, though?" section as its own thing? It perfectly encapsulates my feelings about tech in general in ways I never thought possible and I desperately want to share it around.

this channel fits the video essay genre (30 to 1hr+) but specifically catered to (and for) tech nerds

Hey, I think you're really being unfair to executives; they don't just run Outlook. They also schedule and "run" dozens of meetings that serve no purpose and *could* be an email. Frankly, I *wish* all they did was run Outlook.

"they're trying to compete in a space where competition is logically impossible" Or unimplementable. Case in point: public transit.

I don't know the exact mechanism, but my understanding is there is a standardized way for UEFI code to check whether the OS has completed booting so watchdog timers can be setup to reset the machine in the case the OS fails to boot. So it's probably less fragile than you're thinking.

Absolutely love your videos. One the best on RU-vid. The quick start series is becoming one my favorites on your channel

I didn't think we could GET more wrong than Phoenix Hyperspace. But HP just had to go making something reckless and unnecessary. I really love how deeply you speculate into the probably accurate reasoning for all this behavior too.

I love the timeskip music, did you make it yourself? It's like the perfect Adlib snare / bass combo, so relatable

the talk about features takes my back to my 2011 thinkpad, which had a bright blue button on the keyboard titled "Thinkvantage". all it did was interrupt the boot process and give you a list with shortcuts to the system setup and a temporary boot menu. I used this button a lot because I dualbooted on that laptop and it was easier then trying to figure out how to add both windows and linux to a boot manager.

The second you said "dot ee eff eye" I screamed and threw my phone because I realized *HP created a GUI EFI binary mail spooler*. The horror. (Technically EFI binaries aren't OSes as they don't have a kernel. MS-DOS does/did.) Edit/Update: OK now you're talking about them putting it in the SMM and I'm crying, I'm suing for emotional damages

It's like the meme with the 3 dragon heads where the first 2 heads are normal and the 3ed head is derpy, but with 1 normal head and 2 derpy heads.

Your idea to include a default OS on the motherboard is a really good one. It's a shame that even the cost of the bare minimum EMMC storage to hold a full-featured Linux distro would probably make it out of the question. Immutable distributions like Fedora Silverblue would be good for this since they're designed to be usable without modifying the core system files.

Something rather funny and you see this on pcmr alot is the argument of "is X thing outdated", I see posts of 2080s on there where people ask can it run modern games. If they see a 7/8th gen processor from intel that you immediately need to throw it out and buy new shiny thing. The truth hurts most people if you were to steal their setup, replace it with a 1080ti and 8700k add a nvme ssd. Wouldn't really be able to tell you a difference unless you are running high refresh 1440p/4k.