ExpressGate "instant-on" OS tested on ASUS Eee Box

With a name like instant-on, it just has to be quick, right? Well, sort of. The cool cats over at Laptop paradoxically got to play with ASUS latest ExpressGate-equipped desktop, the Eee Box. Upon mashing the power button and clicking the stopwatch, it took 11 seconds to get to the main ExpressGate page, where users could select the browser, photo viewer, Pidgin chat or Skype button. Upon clicking browser, they found that it took 25 more seconds to push through and get Firefox up and running, putting the grand total for quick clickers at 35 seconds from startup to being on the web. Hit the read link for more coverage of the ExpressGate Olympics, complete with a video that takes 1 to 10 seconds to load depending on connection speed.

[oddish2211 @ Jul 18th 2008 4:27AM]

11 seconds isn't instant on

[Lattyware @ Jul 18th 2008 4:37AM]

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.

[collegekid13 @ Jul 18th 2008 4:26AM]

35 sec till porn. way to long. might as well boot xp

[Colin Potter @ Jul 18th 2008 4:44AM]

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

[zomg0t @ Jul 18th 2008 5:15AM]

@ 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.

[Metkis @ Jul 18th 2008 6:50AM]

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.

[Kurian @ Jul 18th 2008 9:17AM]

My 5HDD Raid 5 array resumes from Hibernate in 10 seconds or less.
And you're not limited to some shitty basic OS.

[Jason @ Aug 2nd 2008 1:07PM]

@Metkis - Hooray for one less firster! Woo hoo!

[diasvfx @ Jul 18th 2008 4:42AM]

Just use Sleep, 5sec to wake up...

[Oinquer @ Jul 18th 2008 5:16AM]

those 24 seconds to get firefox is a little too much....

[Dan Easton @ Jul 18th 2008 4:50AM]

Why is Eeengadget so obsessed with the Eee PC??

[Tes @ Jul 18th 2008 5:34AM]

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?

[:p atrick @ Aug 3rd 2008 7:03PM]

@ Dan

The goggles! They do nothing!

[Hansi @ Jul 18th 2008 4:55AM]

11 seconds, are you kidding? MacOS and Windows both boot from sleep in under 2 seconds, this is completely useless.

[Twitchy @ Jul 18th 2008 7:42AM]

The 11 seconds is from a COLD START, not from 'Sleep'. Let's see your PC/Mac do that!?!

[superfresh @ Jul 18th 2008 8:40AM]

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.

[Hansi @ Jul 18th 2008 8:45AM]

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 :-)

[thedesolate1 @ Jul 18th 2008 1:00PM]

A PS3 is instant on too.... =]

[Dan @ Jul 18th 2008 10:56PM]

@super fresh
Our dlp tv isn't instant on. >:[

[Bernhard @ Jul 18th 2008 5:05AM]

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...

[Oinquer @ Jul 18th 2008 5:18AM]

Why is Engadget so obsessed with Iphone???

[Oinquer @ Jul 18th 2008 5:21AM]

damn...this was for Dan Easton....reply system is so buggy

[TRAFFICBLOWS @ Jul 18th 2008 7:57AM]

whatever... next time try hitting the reply button

all this bitching about the comment system... its called user error.

[ridahgadgetguy @ Jul 18th 2008 6:09AM]

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 !

[Down @ Jul 18th 2008 6:09AM]

11 seconds + 25 seconds = 36 seconds, not 35, you fools!

[Blake @ Jul 18th 2008 11:39AM]

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.

[Matthew C @ Jul 18th 2008 3:33PM]

Its completely insignifigan, but this was the first thing I noticed about this article.

And BTW, even 1 second isn't INSTANT on.

[f14tomdog2 @ Jul 18th 2008 6:17AM]

Id say that's up there with epic fail

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Jul 18th 2008 6:29AM]

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.

[TRAFFICBLOWS @ Jul 18th 2008 8:12AM]

+1

THIS WOULD WORK GREAT FOR A REPLACEMENT TO MY GRUB LOADER

[neofolklore @ Jul 18th 2008 8:25AM]

FUCK YES CRUISE CONTROL THREAD, Xbox Media Center still boots faster.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Jul 18th 2008 9:02AM]

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.

[Andrew Borem @ Jul 18th 2008 8:43AM]

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.

[James K @ Jul 18th 2008 9:58AM]

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.

[z0phi3l @ Jul 18th 2008 10:05AM]

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.

[tmark rushworth @ Jul 18th 2008 10:17AM]

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!

[Jack @ Jul 18th 2008 10:20AM]

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

[Gunbust3r @ Jul 18th 2008 1:17PM]

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?

[myshek123 @ Jul 18th 2008 1:31PM]

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?

[Sol @ Jul 18th 2008 1:45PM]

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.

[wrabbit @ Jul 18th 2008 2:04PM]

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.

[culbeda @ Jul 19th 2008 10:29PM]

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!

[helmi @ Sep 7th 2008 9:00PM]

Dude,
My eee box just went blank after i've reboot it. It wont go to OS and just .... blank
need help!