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System Locked Pre-installation (SLP), also referred to as OEM Activation, is a product activation procedure for Microsoft Windows used by major OEMs of laptops and pre-built PCs wherein a Windows product key is added and locked to the machine's firmware before mass distribution.
A PBA environment serves as an extension of the BIOS, UEFI or boot firmware and guarantees a secure, tamper-proof environment external to the operating system as a trusted authentication layer. [2] The PBA prevents any operating system from loading until the user has confirmed he/she has the correct password to unlock the computer. [2]
[27] [28] Version 1.0 was released in November 2015. [29] In October 2018, the tool was released as open source software when the main developer René Lergner (also known as HeathCliff74) stepped down. [30] The slab bootloader used by Windows RT could be unlocked using a vulnerability, but was silently patched by Microsoft in 2016. [31]
Version 2.0 of the UEFI specification was released on 31 January 2006. It added cryptography and security. Version 2.1 of the UEFI specification was released on 7 January 2007. It added network authentication and the user interface architecture ('Human Interface Infrastructure' in UEFI).
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
UEFI support in Windows began in 2008 with Windows Vista SP1. [22] The Windows boot manager is located at the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ subfolder of the EFI system partition. [23] On Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and later, access to the EFI system partition is obtained by running the mountvol command. Mounts the EFI system partition on the specified drive.
Learn how to download and install or uninstall the Desktop Gold software and if your computer meets the system requirements.
EasyBCD has a number of bootloader-related features that can be used to repair and configure the bootloader. From the "Manage Bootloader" section of EasyBCD, it is possible to switch between the BOOTMGR bootloader (used since Windows Vista) and the NTLDR bootloader (used by legacy versions of Windows, from Windows NT to Windows XP) in the MBR from within Windows by simply clicking a button.