UEFI or Legacy

Emmanuel Dedel · Aug 4, 2014

Good day. I have a Laptop with no OS installed. The laptop's model is Acer Aspire E5-471 without CD/DVD drive and going to install Windows 8.1 32bit. The laptops default mode is "UEFI" and I noticed that my USB DVD drive was not seen on bootable device, then when I change it to Legacy, it works fine. I already installed Windows 8.1 32bit but my TouchPad is not working. So I restarted my Laptop then change my mode into "UEFI" again then something pops up saying that no bootable device found. My questions are:

1) What is the difference between "UEFI" and "Legacy"?
2) How do you know what mode (UEFI or Legacy) I'am going to use when installing different types of windows OS, like win8 x64, win8 x32 something like that.. (Complete details please?).
3) Does USB ports, PS/2, VGA, etc has a compatibility with UEFI and/or Legacy?

Please explain to me in non-technical way, please? Thank you very much.

flyoffacliff · Aug 5, 2014

1. UEFI is newer. The main advantages are UEFI supports booting from a harddrive larger than 2TB, and it boots quicker, esspesily from sleep. Since your BIOS has an supports UEFI, I would recommend installing Windows in UEFI mode.

If Windows is already installed in Legacy mode, I would recommend just leaving it unless you want the features of UEFI mode, in which case you will need to reinstall Windows in UEFI mode.

2. x32 and x64 of Windows 7 or 8 will both work fine with either mode. The x32 version will be limited to 3-4GB of RAM either way. If you have more than 4GB of RAM in the computer, the x64 version would be better.

3. If the drivers are installed correctly in Windows, the ports should work fine in either mode.

Pinhedd · Aug 5, 2014

Emmanuel Dedel :

1. UEFI boot uses the UEFI boot process whereas Legacy uses the BIOS firmware boot process. Most UEFI firmware contains compatibility for BIOS firmware. The UEFI boot process can boot directly to a UEFI service partition located on a physical volume that contains a GUUID Partition Table (GPT); the BIOS boot process invokes an intermediary boot loader located within the Master Boot Record (MBR) which in turn selects the boot partition located on that volume

2. Use UEFI if supported and if available. 32-bit versions of Windows don't support it though.

3. Yes of course. The boot process just alters how the operating system is loaded, not what devices are supported.

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UEFI or Legacy

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