Boot Up

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Boot Up Mean?

To boot up is to start up a computer system by providing it with the required electrical power and loading the startup services until the operating system is loaded. It refers to the process of starting a computer from a dead or offline state, thus making it available to perform any computing operation.

Advertisements

Booting up can also be called boot, booting, bootstrapping and system startup.

Techopedia Explains Boot Up

The boot up process primarily starts when the power button on a CPU or computer system is manually pressed by a human operator. The computer is then activated and performs a series of boot time tests and checks before normal operations can be performed by the user. These checks include the power on self test (POST), which ensures that the computer has enough electrical power to proceed, a peripheral devices check and the initiation of the boot loader, which loads and executes the startup sequence and the operating system.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.