Patent ID: 7080246

Claim:
A method comprising: determining if a hardware system should be configured to a default group of hardware settings; if so, selecting from a plurality of groups of hardware settings stored within at least one non-volatile memory, the plurality having, at least, a platform specific group of hardware settings, and a customized group of hardware settings; reading the selected group of hardware settings from a non-volatile memory; and initializing the hardware system according to the read group of hardware settings; wherein determining if a hardware system should be configured to a default group of hardware settings includes: detecting if a prior boot of the hardware system was successful; if not, determining that the hardware system should be configured utilizing the default group of hardware settings; and wherein reading the selected group of hardware settings from a non-volatile memory includes: reading a group of hardware settings that are stored in an internal form representation format having a series of configuration sets; wherein each configuration set facilitates the configuration of at least one hardware setting and includes: an encoded opcode to specify what type of hardware selling is being configured; and a series of tokenizing strings to facilitate the creation of a human readable question and answer related to the hardware setting.