SlashReality's Journal: My BIOS sucks

So, I decided in my utter stupidity to once again try to add a HD at my whim to my main desktop machine. As usual my bios freaks out and refuses to boot to any device without a 2 minute time out to think about my horrible actions. The reason this time is that a person I know sent me an executable which is supposed to be LOL OMFG AWESOME LMFAO! So I'm thinking I'll just put a spare (small) HD in, install a minimum windows system and run the thing. If it screws up so what. I can just reformat the 1 GB hd in a minute. So after I remembered this I decided to just go ahead and run the damn thing. Turns out that it was just a stupid thing that screwed up all of my network connections. But at this point I don't care because I have to reinstall Windows anyway to get rid of my stupid BIOS problem. Now, I have to wonder why in the past, and currently, reinstalling windows cures these bios ailments. It's obviously some bios funk. Which leads me to this final conclusion. Not only does my bios suck, but mostly all bios suck. As discussed in a previous Slashdot article, BIOS has become a patched upon clutter of utter chaos. I don't know/claim to know/ a thing about HD or CDROM addressing on startup but there has to be some better way. It's just so aggrevating to me that I am being limited in a technical aspect that simply shouldn't exist. Can't HD manufactures agree to 5 or less ways of minimal addressing so that bios doesn't have to change and be patched all the time? Or is it something completely different and I'm way off target?