| ExpressGate Pre-Boot OS - Web Browsing, Speed to Boot |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 23 July 2008 11:34 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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With that out of the way let's move onto our experience using Express Gate. We'll start things off with web browsing portion of Splashtop. The web browser in Splashtop is based on Firefox 2 and looks nearly to the beloved browser. Tabs work great, although most of the options are cut out of the program. Bookmarks are there and it closes pop ups well in addition to privacy settings but extensions look like a no go. That said we had no problems checking out numerous sites for e-mail, news, YouTube and other Flash videos worked without a charm. Trying to load a QuickTime movie trailer did not work but otherwise it is good for a quick web experience. Only one window was able to be open but the number of tabs we had open seem to have limits. Here is a picture of the Asus homepage.
And here is a screenshot of YouTube.
Files can also be saved and some limited management off of USB flash drives including copy, delete, and also downloading files from Firefox onto a flash drive if you need to get something quickly off the net but not run it in Windows, here's an example of that.
We did ask about a possible update of the software to Firefox 3
since it is a much faster browser and with better memory management but we
didn't hear back on that but we assume that would be in the works as an update
to Splashtop. One of the most important things we wanted to test was of course
boot time and how much could really be saved by using Splashtop instead of
booting your OS. Here is our test system.
We tested with a stop watch from the bootup. Our time to ExpressGate is the time it took to load the main OS not the splash screen which was instant. Our OS start time was to Windows Vista desktop the time to Firefox included how long it took me to click on the Firefox shortcut at the bottom and for the browser to load. Firefox 3.01 was used on the desktop as again this is one of the benefits of your main PC and of course one of the drawbacks of Splashtop.
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. Of course there is more than just web browsing you can do so let's move onto other programs.
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