One easy way to meet Microsoft's boot time requirements is to skip input device enumeration, so there's a lot of machines meeting the Windows sticker requirements where entering the firmware either requires a bunch of failed boots or getting far enough into the boot process that you can be offered an opportunity to reboot into the setup menu.

I have a system where you need to hold down power when turning on the PC to get out of "Quick Boot" mode, and get the ability to get to the bios screen. It's a Sandy-Bridge-era Intel motherboard.

Huh, today I learned. I'll consider myself lucky I didn't come across one of these machines yet.

I've encountered way too many of these and I hate them with all my being.

If you want to have (legit) "Designed for Windows" and similar certification, you need to have an option to disable "fast boot" as well as option to enable it.

The fast boot involves skipping a bunch of slower pathways using saved knowledge of minimal set of devices to bring up to boot the OS in happy path, and only reset to "slow path" if it fails.

In fast boot, you're often unable to hit the button to enter the menu and at most get to it through windows "reboot to firmware" option.

How many of these don't have a setting to turn quick boot off?

I was working on my Dad's Dell laptop this weekend, and no matter how quickly I spammed the correct key (F12 in this case) it would miss it and continue to a full boot about 3/4 times. I never figured out if it is just picky about timing, or if it had different types of reboots where some of them entering BIOS wasn't even an option.

Newer Dell laptops have a BIOS option to artificially delay the boot process by a configurable number of seconds to give you more time to enter the menu. Which should be proof enough that the default time window is an issue.

I start tapping as soon as the screen blanks, probably twice a second. I find this to be best for all BIOS/UEFI interfaces.

Mine has a large delay between when the keypress is registered and the menu actually shows up. But, the window for pressing the key itself is quite short. Also, if you spam the key too quickly, it will hang indefinitely instead of entering the menu necessitating a hard-reboot. Good times.

On my last two uefi boards, if I press F12 or F8 too soon after power on it either stalls the boot, or it makes it restart. When the latter happens, I’m always too careful in pressing it causing me to miss the window of opportunity and booting right to the OS. Entering the bios or choosing the boot drive regularly takes me 3 tries. (Gigabyte with Intel and Asus with AMD.)

How many computers are you operating though? Maybe you'll have to reboot a couple times until you figure out the proper key but then you'll know it. And if you forget it, you clearly aren't doing this often enough for it to be a problem either

It really depends on users. Personally... ~100? Servers, clients, dual-boot configurations, lost machines with PXE boot, various brands and BIOS versions, some even still boot in legacy mode because their UEFI support is bad (like PXE boot doesn't work as well as it should, and as well as it does in "BIOS" mode). So having GRUB on basically all these machines, I'm very happy.

If I could do the same with something that is as small in terms of footprint, and is as flexible as GRUB is (we also PXE-boot into GRUB loaded from the network, both in BIOS and UEFI mode), then I'm interested.