There are several BIOS protection passwords systems and how good they are will depend on the model and BIOS of your computer.
Newer computers bring incorporated something called a TPM (Trusted Platform Module).
You can set a password for the Administrator of the computer, another one for the User, another one for anyone trying to tamper with the BIOS and still another one to protect the hard drive (in case the laptop gets stolen, even if they remove the hard drive and put it into another computer to read the contents, they won't be able to do it).
This is a good thing and is also a bad thing if you forget the password. Do a search right here in EE or in Google and you will find tons of posts of people trying to recover their data because they forgot the password..... So whatever you do, make sure you do not forget it.
