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Follow us on FacebookAsus ExpressGate Pre-Boot OS explored
@ 2008/07/27Overall we have to say it is very cool Asus bringing a feature like ExpressGate to their products from desktop to notebook and we assume more in the future. As far as overall usefulness though for a desktop we wonder how many times people will really want to save those extra 30 seconds not loading Windows but probably less often than more as stated before. We do see a lot of room for potential though if there's some reduced functionality state the computer can go in to draw less power and a few more apps added in such as a media player such as VLC. DeviceVM have done a good job overall with ExpressGate and Asus have made themselves standout from the competition again including it on their new products even the lower-end ones.
Asus promotes a 5 second start up time for ExpressGate and we found that to basically be true. Or time to Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit was 32.5 seconds later so a little over a half a minute. Still it took a little longer to load to Firefox even though we clicked on web browser on the Express Gate start up screen immediately with the time to that at 9.5 seconds which would save you a total of 30.5 seconds from Splashtop. 30.5 seconds isn't an amazing savings but then again less than ten seconds to the Firefox web browser is quite good. This however does bring us back to the point made earlier that more often than not people won't use ExpressGate but in those situations where they need to check their e-mail, or contact someone through IM more than quickly but almost immediately to really find ExpressGate useful at least when it is used on their desktop PC.
Asus promotes a 5 second start up time for ExpressGate and we found that to basically be true. Or time to Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit was 32.5 seconds later so a little over a half a minute. Still it took a little longer to load to Firefox even though we clicked on web browser on the Express Gate start up screen immediately with the time to that at 9.5 seconds which would save you a total of 30.5 seconds from Splashtop. 30.5 seconds isn't an amazing savings but then again less than ten seconds to the Firefox web browser is quite good. This however does bring us back to the point made earlier that more often than not people won't use ExpressGate but in those situations where they need to check their e-mail, or contact someone through IM more than quickly but almost immediately to really find ExpressGate useful at least when it is used on their desktop PC.
