How-To Geek

It really is a great concept. Unfortunately it's only the higher end boards that have it right now, but in the future all the boards will.

Neat idea. I have heard of this as Express Gate which is included on the motherboard that my Dad got for his system build. We have read about it, but haven't seen it in action yet. As I understand it, it's a small linux kernel running Mozilla Firefox as the browser. They claim it can boot in 5 seconds to this environment. Since it's running from flash memory, you can't upgrade or add browser plug-ins. Also, when you leave Express Gate, I'm not sure if it saves any data, such as bookmarks. However, that can be a good thing because it's like running the browser in a sandbox.

In the video they show a quick lookup of a map, but can you print it?

Here's another concept from Dell for the I-can't-wait-for-Windows-to-boot crowd. Dell MediaDirect gives you a little button to press that boots in "seconds" to let you play music, videos, and DVDs. It does not appear to give you Internet access.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFVkki8EIfI

Note, however, that Dell uses all 4 available partitions on your boot disk to implement this:
http://www.howtogeek.com/forum.....on-problem