ExpressGate "instant-on" OS tested on ASUS Eee Box
By Darren Murph 
posted July 18th 2008 4:15AM
posted July 18th 2008 4:15AM
posted July 18th 2008 4:15AM
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11 seconds isn't instant on
Well done for saying what the article said, for those who lack the ability to grasp simple concepts that are clearly implied in an article.
Really. Good job.
35 sec till porn. way to long. might as well boot xp
although that is pretty fast, its not really a lot faster than most new machines.... my macbook (black model from before the last revision) with 4gb of RAM boots to the password screen in about 12-13 seconds, entering the password takes another second, remaining data booted takes about 4 seconds, opening safari takes about 20 seconds... total time to web access is roughly 40 seconds, and my friend has a brand new pro that can boot and be online in about 35 seconds... so yeah 35 seconds is nothing spectacular
@ Colin Potter
Keep in mind, this is being run on a 1.6Ghz Atom with 1GB of RAM, not a 4GB system using (I assume) a C2D. But it seems as though this instant-on OS could be improved: in the time Laptop spent introducing the viewers to the initial interface of the OS, instant-on probably could have loaded all applications instead of waiting for the user to choose what it should load before actually doing anything. If it kept a record of the frequency that the user runs each application, it could prioritize loading each application in such an order until the user actually makes the choice.
tl;dr: This OS might be faster on a more powerful system and could probably be greatly improved.
Well, I've done the old delete XP prefetch items trick and cut my 'to welcome screen' time to 4-5 seconds after disabling useless services and etc. full boot hovered around 10 seconds.
Unfortunately, it really isn't that useful and I don't personally mind waiting under a minute to load my computer.
My 5HDD Raid 5 array resumes from Hibernate in 10 seconds or less.
And you're not limited to some shitty basic OS.
@Metkis - Hooray for one less firster! Woo hoo!
Just use Sleep, 5sec to wake up...
those 24 seconds to get firefox is a little too much....
Why is Eeengadget so obsessed with the Eee PC??
Really? That's what you're seeing?
There's a whole banner to pool together all the iPhone stories to cover the addition of 3G, GPS and an app store...which could have all been handled in three stories, but was raped for as many talking points as was concievable...and all you're seeing is Eee stories?
@ Dan
The goggles! They do nothing!
11 seconds, are you kidding? MacOS and Windows both boot from sleep in under 2 seconds, this is completely useless.
The 11 seconds is from a COLD START, not from 'Sleep'. Let's see your PC/Mac do that!?!
Fuck this. If it's not instant-on, it's not instant on. It doesn't matter if it's computer companies or the government...apparently simply saying something is so is good enough. Ya know what's instant-on? A fucking TV set, so when you've reach those speeds, call it instant-on. Until then, stop it.
I can't remember the last time I turned off my Windows computer and my Macbook Air is only rebooted when it crashes, why would I ever use anything other than sleep? I thought everyone always used sleep, cold boot is so 90's :-)
A PS3 is instant on too.... =]
@super fresh
Our dlp tv isn't instant on. >:[
What are you doing Asus! First you produce a bunch of great sub-notebooks, then turn them into $ 600 laptops with strange model numbering, then produce a eee desktop with a so called instant-on OS which does not even instantly turn on. This has pretty much destroyed my appetite for anything to do with Asus. What a shame...
Why is Engadget so obsessed with Iphone???
damn...this was for Dan Easton....reply system is so buggy
whatever... next time try hitting the reply button
all this bitching about the comment system... its called user error.
oh Asus what have you done with yourself , first the eeepc 701 wich was marvelous and exellent , then the eeepc 901 with a bigger screen wich soothed our appetite but after that ut so called small and affordable laptops became getting bigger and bigger , i advise u to return to the old 701 days !
11 seconds + 25 seconds = 36 seconds, not 35, you fools!
When someone asks me what time it is, I usually round it off and just say 11:30 (or whatever time it is). I then often hear someone(not part of the conversation) sneer back, "No, it's 11:31" (and then they proceed to push their glasses back onto the bridge of their nose).
You're that person.
The point they were making is that it takes a long ass time to boot up for something they call "instant-on." Don't be such a jack-ass.
Its completely insignifigan, but this was the first thing I noticed about this article.
And BTW, even 1 second isn't INSTANT on.
Id say that's up there with epic fail
All of this express gate stuff could easily be sold as a PCI addon.Booting to XP would be possible, because the addon card would have boot.ini like menu that asked (with a short timer) if you want to boot to spashtop or the first hard drive.
+1
THIS WOULD WORK GREAT FOR A REPLACEMENT TO MY GRUB LOADER
FUCK YES CRUISE CONTROL THREAD, Xbox Media Center still boots faster.
An improvement upon this idea would be to add such functionality to a standard (Adaptec, LSI) SAS controller bios that controls your drives data and power. This way, you can boot to spash with out having to spin your hard drives up, thus saving their usable life. Even better would be for the splash to run off the controller's CPU and ram; this may also allow the spash to run with in windows as well.
Two installs of windows XP could do this much more quickly. An install that is securityless, with all prefetching and most all drivers turned off, could boot up in under ten seconds. And then your default install could have all of your files and software on it. Pssh. I used to boot XP up in under 20 seconds on an AMD athlon 2200+ with 128mb of RAM. I am very unimpressed by ExpressGate.
There are two versions of Express Gate. One that boots from flash memory built into the motherboard. The other is called Express Gate Lite which is stored on the hard drive and has slower boot times, which is probably the version found on the Eee Box.
Watch the video it's fast, but Asus needs to ditch the "pre screen" and come up with a better solution, maybe two buttons instead. Using the pre screen crap, makes it seem slower than it really is.
Does anyone remember Workbench for Amiga, they had the OS built into a chip that was 100% instant on - with icons and everything! i really dont understand why this cant be replicated even with the PC!
This is definatly not worth it for me, my current computer can be surfing the web within 30 seconds of pressing power, and its running Vista, Amazing, I know
Once you are in "instant on" mode dose the real OS load in the background, or do you have to wait another XX seconds when you want into that?
I dont see the point in shutting down the computer only to reboot it into a worse os to do simple tasks when you can just put the computer to sleep and have the full os 30 seconds faster. Are there any disadvantages in putting the computer to sleep in the long run?
Hey, this is Sol from the Splashtop team. Thanks for the post and all the great feedback. We definitely want to see the speed on the Eee Box get faster, we are working constantly to improve the speed on all Splashtop products. When there's a production model that's shipping and available to consumers, we hope to see significantly faster boot times.
I'm curious, how do people pronounce ASUS?
I pronounce it kinda like hey-sus, just without the H sound, but then the chick in the video pronounced it as ha-sus (again without the H sound), so it got me wondering what the generally accepted pronunciation.
So I hear a bunch of people bitching that 11 seconds is too long, ergo Expressgate is pointless. Well, as a proud owner of an ASUS motherboard with ExpressGate, I can tell you that this is an AWESOME feature. The "instant-on" aspect is cute and all, and it takes about 8-9 on system. But hey, you have to hit at least the minimal BIOS screens to get INT13 drive support and you can tune that time down if you're that anal about it. And my browser comes up quickly. I'm not sure about this 25 second nonsense.
But "instant-on" is not why I like Expressgate. Imagine being able to effortlessly access the web to download drivers, research issues WHILE you're installing a new motherboard, WITHOUT the need of another computer and sneaker-netting. Imagine troubleshooting a hard disk or driver failure from the same box. (or hell, filling out the RMA for a drive that just died ON the computer that was using that drive. It's built-in. It's quick. It's effortless, And best yet, it can do most of the stuff that Firefox can do, minus a bunch of extensions. (Common features like Flash work and work well. You can youtube and google maps all day if you like.)
In short, the "instant-on" is a fun thing to play with and it can come in handy once in a great while, but having the backup access to the internet in the event of a problem makes Expressgate incredibly useful!
Dude,
My eee box just went blank after i've reboot it. It wont go to OS and just .... blank
need help!