Hardware manufacturer MSI is reportedly offering free EFI upgrades for its motherboards that still ship with the old-fashioned BIOS, starting June. MSI has always been one of the most active companies that strongly advised the industry to move away from the rudimentary BIOS setup to a more elegant EFI interface.

According to the company, each customer who buys a MSI P45 motherboard will receive a free upgrade to EFI as of June this year. The company did not say which P45-based motherboards are eligible for the free upgrade, but it is alleged that they will initially be delivered to higher-end motherboards, then disseminated across the market.

EFI is the next generation of BIOS environment that has nothing in common with the legacy BIOS interface as we know it today. EFI stands for Extensible Firmware Interface and lets users control the main computer settings in a friendly and eye-candy environment. For instance, EFI fully supports mice and other pointing devices, which dramatically reduces the set-up and configuration headache.

Although EFI was believed to be less friendly with users not running Windows Vista SP1, MSI claims that there are no problems on any other operating system from Microsoft except for Windows 95 / 98 / ME. However, unless you are running Windows Vista x64 SP1, you won't be able to read the system hardware using a hardware monitoring piece of software, such as CPU-Z.

The good news is that users who are running Windows XP will still be able to manually tweak the EFI settings to overclock the MSI motherboard. Other operating systems are also supported: for instance, Linux-based systems have been certified as EFI-compatible since 2000, by using either the elilo EFI boot loader or EFI versions of grub.

Apple has implemented EFI support since Mac OS X v10.4 (called the Tiger), although MSI users are less likely to be running Apple's operating systems due to the limitations imposed in the End-User License Agreement.