AMDZone explores ExpressGate pre-boot OS:

Before we get into the review though we do want to address one of the best things and worse things about Express Gate. I'm willing to place bets that the odds are more often than not when booting their main PC most people are going to want to go immediately to their main operating system 90% or more of the time. Although the pre-configured time to boot into your OS is ten seconds, which can be lowered in the BIOS, and you can move your mouse to the "Enter OS" button and give it a click in a matter of seconds it does of course add to your boot time and require an additional step to boot if you use your mouse to click to enter your main OS even if only seconds. On most people's main machines there will though come those times now and then where they quickly need to check their e-mail, reach someone on AIM, make a VOIP call, or browse the web to get information. Hopefully this doesn't seem to be bashing at the beginning of our investigation but one of the features we think Asus or DeviceVM should look into is some option say at the normal Asus' splash screen when one has booted the computer for a command such as CTRL-E to instead load the ExpressGate OS for when those moments do come up. When you really can't wait those extra 35 seconds for Windows to load to check your e-mail or browse the web for what you need. Is this an engineering possibility? That we don't have an answer to but if ExpressGate is to become popular and be accepted, and we do believe it is a very cool and unique feature worth exploiting, when booting on your main PC there should be a command from system startup to instead load the ExpressGate OS. Otherwise we do find it likely that after some of the novelty wears off people will more than likely disable ExpressGate from loading rather than have it start every single time they boot their computer as even though it is only mere seconds it is still adding to the boot time. People go to deep measures to save seconds off their Windows OS boot time so adding even two or three seconds and requiring an extra step every time they turn on their PC we believe will eventually cause them to disable it as ExpressGate's use, at least in regards to your main PC, will more than likely only be now and then and in emergency situations where you're running late say for work or to catch a movie. I haven't done a survey of users but odds are this is much less often than more often at least in my case and I assume your average person. Some command at the normal Asus splash screen to load this would do wonders I believe for ExpressGate's acceptance.

Overall 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.

Where we really see more potential for ExpressGate is perhaps with Asus smaller netbooks or other applications where reduced functionality and improved start up time are key. The job of Splashtop is never to replace Windows XP or Vista but to handle all the basic tasks more people want to do so and to do it in a very user friendly, easy to manage way. After spending some time with ExpressGate one thing that came to mind for use on a device not requiring less functionality immediately was portable video players or MP3 players. This one market place Asus hasn't entered and although Archos, Creative, and others are doing a fairly good job a touch-screen version of ExpressGate with Asus' typical quality hardware and media player functions might be one heck of a winner. Of course that's just an opinion but we look forward to how DeviceVM might build out Splashtop and where ExpressGate might fall in line with Asus' wide range of products. Since this is more of an investigation than a review we don't have a score but overall we quite liked our time with ExpressGate and don't have very much bad to say at all.