I feel like there's a computer equivalent of an escape room in that operating system, where the goal is to escape into the file system and call for help.
I had to install ChromeOS on my grandma's old laptop so she wouldn't be as vulnerable to scams and viruses. I could see ExpressGate making a comeback but targeted at children and the elderly.
@@taruxy ChromeOS is more or less a stripped version of linux, which includes a number of CLI utilities but is otherwise just the chrome browser. Flashing ChromeBooks i've started just using GalliumOS on everything due to sound driver fighting, and it's very quick and is a full Linux Distro.
Is a great idea until you have to run that one program that thing insist they need. Currently have a guy who really shouldn't be on windows doesn't want to be on windows in his afraid that Microsoft is altering everything on his computer with every update and deleting files. Yet he is so hard stuck in outlook an old version of Outlook!
I remember Express Gate. It was actually pretty cool. A secret 2nd operating system. I used it to look at porn when I was way too young. My dad had no way of finding my Express Gate search history.
my friend saw the word express gate on the vid and immediately went into the closet to grab a motherboard that has the words "express gate" on it and showed it to me very enthusiastically. He said he was able to access windows files system with that one and got rid of a directory that prevented him from booting into windows ( possibly virus?). Perhaps it is the cloud version that was able to do this, so I'm very excited to see the upcoming videos. So far this series has been a blast and I basically click on the videos as soon as I see the notification on patreon!
Ok. Ok. Everyone has a strong bad but nobody has a good strong bad ... That was an astoundingly good strong bad.. he absolutely nailed that voice... I get it. We've all had 25 years to hone our strong bads... But that was small batch artisanal... That was aged in oak barrels... That was bought by a collector who never shuts up about it.
"no laptop should be larger than 13 inches" "no laptop should be larger than 8 inches" Excited for him to pull out like a palm pilot for the third escalation of this bit
The minute you mentioned that we could have had Linux based system utilities on so many motherboards my brain exploded. Even as a windows user that would have been amazing and could have helped so many users out. It's crazy that never happened!
The GNU core utilities which come with literally every GNU/linux distribution are incredibly useful, but it's been 50 years or something so no one outside of the linux user base knows about them. The one I use most is dd. dd will write an iso image to flash memory with no hassle nor silly questions. It's the simplest, quickest, most reliable way I've found to make bootable USBs of almost anything. And it's been a thing since the '70s. I felt cheated when I discovered it 😅
About the broken motherboards: that USB port overcurrent error is often caused by one of the jumpers that switch a set of USB ports between regular power and standby power being missing. It has happened to me on an ASUS AMD board not much newer than yours, and adding the missing jumper fixed it.
huh! That's bizarre, I wish I'd known about it - I mean, these boards are trash anyway, but it would have saved me a little bit of money making this ep, haha.
I actually did use ExpressGate on my Asus laptop in college a little bit!! Before everyone had a smartphone, it was actually useful to quickly check my email between classes when my laptop was already shut down. But then in junior year I got a smartphone, and that use case became completely unnecessary. I always thought it was novel technology that was just too limited in its use cases.
CERN heavily relied on Skype on Linux for their internal comms for years. I know my lab in USF did too back in the Skype days. I can't believe that so much of the fabric of communication in science labs primarily running Linux desktops, to talk to their Windows overlords, was powered by...ASUS shipping a cut-down Linux distro on all their motherboards. Thanks, ASUS? Thasus?
Man I kind of love the theoretical idea of all motherboards having like 8-32gb of eMMC storage for a small fast Linux partition to act as either a quick boot or recovery os. Back before SSDs I could see like a full fast booting Linux being a great thing when you just need to search or edit something fast but I don't want to make a sandwich while I wait for my computer to boot. Probably would of helped Linux be more popular then it is. Shame nothing like that ever happened.
99.9% sure Microsoft would have prevented that from happening on a massive scale, if not already. Maybe that's the reason why all of this was a marketing failure: it was (forcibly) by design.
I had an ASUS M4N98TD that lasted me from around 2010 to 2020 when it finally started acting strange. I had to look at the manual to see if it had Express Gate and according to the online copy I was reading it did. In the entire time I was using it, I was completely unaware of it even existing.
Same damn thing. I would seen EXPRESSGATE during boot, but always thought it was some be firmware addition to the BIOS. Unfortunately I was right in the wrong way Thanks Gravis
I had an X58 board that had that as a child (hand-me-down). I think I remember it being a bios option and maybe using it's web browser when I being young and dumb broke my dual boot Linux / Win7 setup (I don't do this, I use WSL because I'm lazy). I'm actually using an Asus board (B450 TUF or something like this), and have had zero problems with any of them. Given the whole X3D CPU's literally cooking themselves, esp on Asus boards (although this is the highest-end stuff), maybe not the highest end stuff.
Intel Macs have an actually useful version of this, the firmware has the ability to connect to the internet, download a recovery OS into RAM and then live boot it from RAM. You could access a full terminal, mount the disk if it was working, reinstall the OS, and access a modern working version of Safari. It is so nice never needing to flash an install USB to reinstall. It also allowed me to keep working when the boot drive failed completely. I dont know why nobody has implimented this for windows, it seems like it could be built into the BIOS since it would just need to download the recovery OS, not store it.
Some newer Dell Optiplexes I’ve worked with have this sort of feature (“SupportAssist OS Recovery”) but I haven’t seen it on any consumer-level kit (probably for OS licensing reasons)
@@ChrisWijtmans for sure. But not every mobo can boot from LAN, connect to 's recovery image server and download an OS when there's no disk/a damaged disk present. I don't think most folks are hosting their own WDS/MDT server anyway :P
This is an advantage to having a unified hardware / software vendor. That said, I've never used it. I just maintain a library of installers on CD/DVD/SD, going back to 10.0, because I assumed it would fail to work about three years after the computer was released. It wouldn't be _impossible_ to do something similar for Windows or Linux -- it would just have to go through a hardware detection process and download the appropriate drivers as well (assuming it had them.) Not quite as elegant as having a "this model = this image" thing on the server.
I had Express Gate on a socket 775 board, and it actually came in handy. My hard drive died and while I was waiting for it to be RMA'd, I used the chat/pidgin app and browser. It wasn't great, but it was better than nothing.
Holy trinity of channels: Technology Connections for electronics till 80' and analog tech, LGR for 80-90' pc and oddware and CRD for early 2000. Imagine a collab of them togheter
I did boot this once off an Asus motherboard, thought to myself "neat", then never looked at it again and forgot it existed. Excellent coverage of this fascinating artifact.
I absolutely adore your dedication to bring us this series about a feature that nobody ever cared about and probably never will. And I certainly won't miss one second of it, because you make it interesting and accessible. It reminds me of the engine teardowns on I do Cars that i am absolutely addicted to.
It was today that I found out the motherboard I have been using for the past TWELVE YEARS has EG built in, and I consider myself a prime example of a nerd. If it wasn't for "never change a running system" I would love to figure out how to boot that up und have a play with it, just to see what I could have been actively ignoring all those years.
I used Express Gate for exactly what you just spoke about: to let someone, usually a family member, to use my computer to look things up on the internet.
My man, you can make literally the most mundane, overlooked hardware and software into truly entertaining videos. I'm really happy to see how much your channel is growing. It's very well-deserved.
This was a fun video! You're really getting your narration/presentation style shined up, even with such an arcane and dry topic. It's cool to see how your videos are evolving over time. Keep at it. :D
I distinctly remember using something like this once when after putting together a new build and discovering I couldn't boot into Windows, I used the web browser feature to look things up for tech support and join an IRC channel with a web-based client. At that point in time, before I had a smartphone and access to the Internet even if my computer was down, it was really handy to have to be able to look up how to fix something.
This is epic, like half of the computer in the library I used to go to in my childhood have this silly thing because Asus had a strong foothold in government computer service in my region since it's a domestic brand, being some 8 year old without any jacksh!t knowledge about either English or computer, we all basically ignored it and proceed to wait about 5 minute for it to boot windows XP.
Makes sense for Taiwan. Visited there a decade ago since the Chinese (moved there after CCP) half of my family lived there. Don't remember seeing too much Asus, although we didn't go to tech places because me and my dad (not the Chinese side) are the only computer people in our family. Ironically I had one of those boards as a child (hand-me-down), and may have used ExpressGate, albeit as a child (middle/secondary school, hand-me-down) who had no business dual booting Linux and Windows.
I forgot about pidgin! Also a homestar reference?! I love this channel, reminds me of when I was doing tech support when XP was the most common operating system but Vista was creeping in and we all hated it. Some customers' computers seemed completely unable to function, and now I'm realizing that while there was a level of technical ineptitude that made most calls painful, the state of machines and operating systems in this time definitely didn't help! Legitimately interesting history imo!
I did unironically use Splashtop OS (The unbranded version) and cared enough to both preserve it and make an offline installer for it. Unfortunately when I sent it to CRD it was to late for this video, but he does have access to a version of Splashtop that from memory uses Google Chrome instead and can be installed on any brand.
Sony uses splashtop in their early 2010s pcs. It either had a browser only (firefox 3 based, im not even joking) or apparantly had a word processor built in. Idk why they had 2 solutions (last video wasnt splashtop). This was fantastic for people who didn't have access to their home computer outside of supervised time. (I only had my dad's pc in the house and it had a password). I used it heavily when I was grounded and didnt have my school laptop. I could watch youtube via any site that supported youtube embeds, so stuff like cleartube was great. idk why it was like that. I could order pizza from it (only papa johns worked, nothing else).
It's Firefox 3 because major version numbers only came with big jumps and changes every few years, but minor revisions and security updates still happened about as often as they did. After Firefox 4 released did they change to the *every change needs a new version* method, otherwise we'd probably be in Firefox 5 after the migration that happened around the v67 (I think).
It was great on the EEE PC line as EG was so light it even made theAMD Bobcat snappy. Ironically my EEE PC is now running Q4OS which is a hell of a lot like Express Gate as far as look and feel but more functional of course.
@@theholyviper I mentioned this as a comment in his last video. But one time, I reinstalled windows and since that deleted the Express Gate installation, my PC would start up and just get stuck at a black screen because it was looking for Express Gate which wasn't there. It took me weeks to figure out the problem. I tried replacing the CMOS batter and my PC booted up just fine, then if I tried to reboot it wouldn't work. So I figured out removing and reinserting the CMOS battery would let it boot once. From there I figured out it was because it was loading default BIOS settings. Then after tinkering with the BIOS I figured out Express Gate was the problem.
In roughly this era, maybe a bit later, I had a Netbook (Asus, I believe) that I mostly used as a media player for my commutes. Fortunately, I had pretty good luck with Hibernate with it (I've usually had pretty good luck with Windows Hibernate). I remember noticing the device offering a system like this that included media player functionality. I tried it one time. I found it took longer to boot than restore from Hibernate. And the media player was complete garbage. I remember questioning it's existence at the time. Update after watching the video: I believe it was almost certainly this software and my memory of "garbage media player" was probably actually "oh, there's no media player."
If you find it interesting I'd enjoy a video giving some tips for a younger person trying to begin in the hobby of collecting old tech. It's a bit daunting and I'm constantly looking for guidance and motivation. Thank you for considering it. I love your channel.
22:23 Can confirm, my main desktop for a VERY long time ran on an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution, which featured ExpressGate. I think I used it once just to make sure it actually worked in the last 10+ years of owning/using that PC.
I used express gate once to get on the internet to figure out a booting problem. Once that was solved I never went back into it. It also looked a lot newer than that from what I remember.
Saw your writeups on this stuff. I'm happy to see this investigation ended up in a video. The black magic they've done in some of the instant on stuff is wild.
How have I not discovered this channel sooner, the jokes are fresh, the topics are intriguing, and the quality is better than most tech mainstream channels. I look forward to watching your videos!
Loved seeing the Asus and Lenovo netbooks on your channel, I have a soft spot for netbooks, I had an MSI Wind u100 back in 2009, and I loved it. There’s something charming about them, even though they were severely underpowered and were taken over by iPads and when ultrabook sized laptops became the standard. All the tech wizard teachers in my old high school had them, and some of em refused to use Windows and were full on Linux.
Believe it or not, i'm watching and writing this on a netbook with an N270. Straight from the era. I managed to force Chromium to use GMA950 for accelerated compositing, blur effects and whatnot. Linux of course. MSI Wind i remember they seemed nice, though realistically they were all kind of eerily similar. I think my favourite MSI is not a netbook though but S262/S271 Megabook barebone, older but modest upper class.
Reading the articles for this on your website was one of the wildest rides I've had on the Internet. A handful of years ago I had an MSI motherboard that also had this quick-boot thing but it was optional; I remember it being rather late for this sort of thing (it was a Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge board). It was, regrettably, basically just Splashtop again. I kinda want to play around with it but my sister now uses it for her PC and I don't want to make like I'm going to see her then proceed to ignore her and play on her computer instead.
Wait, THAT'S what those buttons on the old HPs did? My high school gave us surprisingly high-end Elitebooks back in the day, and despite a lot of us kids regularly managing to make those things do things they definitely weren't supposed to do... I'm pretty sure literally none of us ever discovered those functions. I doubt anyone in the school ever did, even the IT people who bought and imaged the machines. Fascinating. EDIT: I just looked on eBay and for some reason those old first-generation EliteBooks are still >$100?? I can see the higher-end ones being usable, but the lower-end ones often had dual-core CPUs...
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Gravis,most of the topics you are talking about in your films i couldn't care less about, but anyway i watch every one from start to finish with a lot of enjoyment You have the talent to talk about that 😀
18:21 I do remember some 90s bios having mouse support and even an integrated UI, I thought it was odd that it was discontinued, until recently like you mentioned.
thats what UEFI basically is. Its a UI and there is a console too that not many know about. Also UEFI loads firmware from device and passes it to the OS... which is a massive security breach but whatever.
I bought my laptops used with a broken OS, so most of these extra buttons were a mystery I didn't care much about. They are nice to have if your macro recorder program can detect them.
Sony Vaio's also had their own splashtop os called Quick Web Access, which was basically the same. But one of my dell inspirons has something called MediaGate which was some media center thing made by Cyberlink and it ran on Windows XP but it booted a lot quicker
The only thing I Kno the media button for is that my Vaio laptop had some annoying bloatware bug that would cause it to leak handles and crash after a day - unless you pressed that button, which didn't do anything else
You've easily become one of my favorite creators on the whole platform. I love obscure tech deep dives like this. Keep up the really excellent work, you've improved a ton since you started!
XP was so common on those Netbooks because Microsoft gave away the licenses for about $30 if the machine fell under certain criteria for screen size, CPU and RAM. I think at the time they were planning to stop selling XP, but recognized Vista was still too heavy for those budget machines. When I ran the original Acer Aspire One for a few years back then, a clean install of XP was pretty snappy on the Atom CPU, but even back then I wondered why Microsoft didn't just try to make a slimmed down version of Vista for machines like this if they were all practically running the same Atom chipset.
I just found your channel from a link in a reddit comment explaining what that wierd button on his old Dell laptop did, and I really liked your channel. More authentic than LTT.
Funnily enough, I was just using Splashtop before watching this. The modern one though. I didn't know it was related to whats on these old laptops. Weird to reuse the name, but it is a good one.
I used both Splashtops in the past. Both OS and remote desktop program. Both personal and business. I recommend RustDesk as an open source alternative.
17:30 QQ is actually the most popular IM software in China then and still is one of the more widely used nowadays (made by tencent, one of the biggest tech company in China and around the world). It's never marketed outside of China though so ASUS or DeviceVM probably supported it specifically for the Chinese market
I was recently surprised to find a very clanky very basic efi boot implementation on an early AM3 board, it takes much longer than MBR to boot but still does work with any modern OS and even NVME drives before they were invented.
I remember using “Wubi” to install Ubuntu as a special section of my Windows filesystem, which I imagine worked much like that installable ExpressGate you showed off. But of course that gave me a full copy of Ubuntu I could run (which absolutely booted faster than my junky Windows install that I really should’ve cleaned up)
Your comment on how that issue with the Chip could be the Current Monitoring circuit failing and causing the USB warning message might have just helped me realize something about an issue we're having with some components at work, will post an update if this was actually the case
@@jackkraken3888 That could be a number of things unfortunately. For us, we have our own boards and stuff, and Im trying to troubleshoot something with that, not just navigating windows stuff
I remember this! Well, not just remember, I still have a pc using a motherboard with Asus Express Gate as a feature. It's an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 if I remember correctly. I always immediately disabled it myself because I needed faster access to the bios for my overclocks, but when I saw the last video I figured it was the exact kind of strange semi-OS you were looking for. Lo and behold, here's the video on it! Update after starting the video: Well goddamn, there it is! There's the motherboard! God tier motherboard for the time. Pushed the Xeon I slapped in it all the way up to 4.4 Ghz no problem.
I actually used that for a while, and then, of course there were no updates to expressgate ever, which meant in the end, after loosing all IM support even back in the day, the only thing that somewhat worked was the browser... The motherboard I had at the time was an ASUS P6X58D-E.
I mean, Windows comes with a small 'emergency' OS to restore your main OS, built into your main OS (safe mode). Another failsafe is using the instal DVD/USB, it can be used to fix practically any damaged Windows installation. Next up is some WindowsPE on a USB stick with special recovery tools (or the same on a Linux Live CD/USB).
@@someguy4915 yeah but look, what if you screw up your EFI partition and don't have another pc then you are screwed, you can't download any other os to make that recovery USB stick and like keeping that USB at hand all the time is unrealistic, like I have dozens of SD cards floating around as I put them into things I sell and yet I don't have any SD with recovery os just couple of weird firmware copy cards and one with clean windows image and clonezilla
@@give_me_my_nick_back True, but if you're messing with your boot partition you probably should already prepare by making a recovery partition on your SSD or a USB stick. Keeping a USB stick at hand is unrealistic? How, unless you're destroying your boot partition on your laptop while on a plane, you're at home, open the drawer and there is the USB stick :P If you lost the USB stick, the cat broke it or you never made one, you can borrow one from the neighbors. If the neighbors won't talk to you you can ask a friend. Either way you should be able to get a Windows USB within 30 minutes or so, usually by just opening your 'junk drawer'. The idea of some failsafe 'OS' to recover the main one sounds nice, but for most issues such an embedded OS is far too limited and for the tasks that an embedded OS is suitable there's a hundred (better/easier/...) alternatives already. Basically, I'd hazard a guess that you can find forum posts and TH-cam videos on how to recover your EFI partition using the Windows installer while I doubt there'll be anything on how to do the same while on Expressgate :P
@@someguy4915 Safe mode isn't a mini OS. It's just running the OS without drivers enabled. Great if drivers are the problem, but not very useful otherwise. No, the emergency OS to restore your OS is called Recovery Mode. Though Windows 10 even discourages that and instead encourages you to use automated repair.
@@ZipplyZane Obviously Safe mode isn't a literal mini-OS... Just like a full Linux Live CD with rescue tools isn't very mini either... Besides that, safe mode is useful for driver issues, security issues (mainly certificate/signing related), software issues, registry mess ups, and so on, not just driver issues. Recovery Mode isn't an OS either btw...
I have owned or had to work on numerous HP Elitebook 8540 laptops for friends and coworkers in the past; very popular laptop in the refurb space because, like you said, at the time it was released the HP Elitebook 8440p was a beast of a machine and was still a serviceable business laptop 3-5 years down the line (especially if you drop in a 2.5" SSD). Presumably, it had the same HP QuickWeb on it that you found in the Elitebook 8440... and yet, I never knew this existed. Of course once you've put in an SSD, you would be a fool to use it; Windows 7 on an SSD would load at pretty much the same speed but with a full Windows feature set. Good finds--all of these Vista/HDD busting gimmicks--and I appreciate you running this series.
Yooo, just wanted to say it's crazy to see how this channel grew from not even 10k subs in a basement to basically a Technology Connections but different. Well deserved!
This is spectacular. I'm captivated and I never even saw any of this stuff back in the day because I guess I either bought laptops that were too good, or desktop parts that were too low-end. If they just put up a terminal ExpressGate could easily have been the most talked about thing on tech forums of the day and brought ASUS a surprising amount of business. The near-miss here is painful. Also, love the meme video cut-ins. This Is Rock And Roll indeed.
It's not often that I finish watching an hour-long TH-cam video and think "damn, I wish this kept going for another hour". Really looking forward to the next part! Great job. You reminded me that I have an old P7P55D motherboard with ExpressGate. When I first got it and build a pc with it I remember entering into EG and thinking "huh, this is neat". And then I never used it again.
I remember seeing Express Gate on the motherboard of the first PC I built (Windows 7 era) and just assuming it was marketing nonsense about booting into Windows faster. I never saw the "click an app" splash screen, I wonder if it was disabled by default on my model.
Props for balancing audio and not having an intro/ outro and still producing great content. If I make the mistake of leaving autoplay on my queue (other creators) on I hear about it from the better half the next day
I assume you mean the loud flashy music intros and outros and yeah, one of the few criticisms I'll happily level, even at the people I respect on youtube, is over this. I have no idea what they're supposed to accomplish and I'm *positive* they drive people away. not a large number, but still, I just don't know what the plus side is supposed to be to make up for it.
That's insane. I had that exact motherboard and two BFG 8800GTS OC cards in SLI. That computer was such a piece of junk. I was constantly fixing it. I must have turned off Express Gate in the BIOS because I don't remember this at all. Or was that the Asus P5NE-SLI motherboard I also had? I can't remember which one had the BFG cards. I definitely had the P6T Deluxe but I think mine was an original, not a v2. Anyway, yeah, I probably disabled it so that I could skip the 10 seconds during boot that it waits for you to pick an option before carrying on to Windows. I knew I'd never use it so why add those seconds to my boot?
Wait. Maybe it was just one 8800gts oc and the other Asus board I had was running two GTX280s. Man. I cannot remember. One of them had an SLI setup and it's tempting to say it was the board with SLI in the name but I don't think it was. It doesn't matter, I guess. The point is I had that same Asus motherboard and I turned off Express Gate the very first time I ever turned it on and never looked back.
Regarding linux boot times, my eMachines e350 was managing to boot my full fat Ubuntu install circa 2010 or whatever in perhaps 10 or 15 seconds. It was absurdly fast compared to 7 starter, even though it was booting from a garbage 4500rpm spinner. I still have the machine, maybe I ought to try archlinux32 on it ...
I still love my ee-pc and I even did surgery on it to get a new fan in there. It now runs a SSD too. And still, only time I knew it has something expressy was when I disabled the prompt in the bios to get it to boot faster. Never knew what it was. WOW!
I feel like I have to defend having a spinny drive as OS/Only drive, mostly as a cautionary tale. This is my first homebuilt PC, I wanted a SSD in it for the OS, but because my My Music/My Video/My Documents is absolutely massive, I wanted to know how to do that thing where your Userfiles are on a separate drive from your OS, which I knew was possible because a old school laptop had that, despite only having 1 HDD which was split in 2 partitions. Unfortunately whenever I asked I just got insulted for not even knowing the name of what I tried to achieve. So I gave up. Then I got 2 big HDD's and tried to RAID mirror them so I would at least have a hot spare at any time. Still with the OS drives, that also didn't work and only found that out too late. Moral of the story, don't be a dick to people trying to learn since they will try dumb things since they haven't learned a thing.
I recall launching the browser portion, ONCE, just to see what it was offering. Now older machines sometimes had a version of BASIC, and while my PC's were busy running memory tests which slowed the boot process considerably, the Tandy Colour Computer (I have the model 3) will flash the screen momentarily and then be ready to accept commands. ROM cartridges, when used, give the impression of a games console of the era, and get you into your software fairly quickly. It's taken us a while to get back to a place where they can reach a useable state in a matter of seconds.
Dude.. I can't believe you pulled out the P6T Deluxe V2! That was my main motherboard for almost a decade. I ran an intel i7-920 overclocked to 3.2Ghz on watercooling. It was the greatest thing ever I loved that thing. Still have it, still runs like a charm.
Being the owner of several Asus laptops and motherboards in my youth I thank you for helping explain this feature to me. Although I never got to use it since I did not have any Internet connection until at least the 10's.
“Double Bass!” *cue bafflingly, yet impressive crazy keyboard drum solo that he was way more excited and proud of than the tone of the creative keyboard demonstration ever called for… …And I absolutely love every second of this wacky creative keyboard drum demonstration video, it brings back memories! You can just tell how much he always wanted to be a rockstar, and damn it! He is not going to miss this one chance to show off, and be a rockstar, for at least this one moment, even if it’s for a silly charmingly stilted Creative keyboard product video… 😆
one of my buddies gave me a PC that he got from a thrift store for 20 dollars, that I've been in the process of repurposing to give to one of my friends. it's a machine circa 2010 with a core i7 920 and an Asus p6t motherboard. every time it boots up there's a message that briefly appears on screen about express gate, and you're absolutely right that it lives in the back of your head because I never thought about it until seeing this video randomly show up in my recommendations
Back in the early 2000's I always wondered why no motherboard brand included an internal usb-stick with drivers. Nothing was more frustrating than installing Windows just to find out that the network driver isn't included so you can't connect to the internet and download it. ExpressGate seems like a really nice feature if your OS doesn't boot and you need to search for the issue or you need to download a driver.
A colleague of mine had an old eepc. It was old when he had it in 2012. It was still handy. He’d long wiped xp off of it and bunged Linux on it. It was more than fast enough for his needs, and it was small enough that he could shove it in a bag. He still got reasonable battery life.
Dude, I love this series so much. My sister had an Eee PC back then for school. I ended up inheriting it and trying to convert it to a lightweight Ubuntu thing, but I (at, like 11 - 13yo) was struggling too much to fix some motherboard issues it had.
I had an Asus laptop from the very end of the ExpressGate era, and used it a grand total of 3 times. Once when I installed the extra stuff it needed to see WTF it actually was. Once when a friend asked why my laptop had two power buttons to show them, and once to log into my university's coursework submission system 2 minutes before deadline to submit queued work (the 2 minute boot time for Windows would have killed me). I think I had that laptop for 8 years.
So... I timed the Toughbook today. 2 minutes, 33 seconds from dead cold (I don't have that "Fast Startup" doo-doo on, it causes more problems than it's worth) to fully operational (Logged in, on the desktop, Steam started up and at my library page, Discord logged in and active, Firefox open). Then again, I did learn patience from my previous rig. That was a heavy-duty workstation rig with twin CPUs that would take 30 seconds to get going _before_ the BIOS splash screen showed up. Then it slogged along through a RAID controller and finally started loading Windows 7. At that point, it was at the mercy of a 10k RPM box of spinning rust. It was a very slow boot process, but it was worth it in the end for a very fast system. That said, I couldn't imagine going through all of that lingering, slow boot-up, only to then have a slow-as-frozen-molasses system afterward.
I have been benging your videos since I saw the first episodes when it got recommend I love how you take a technology issue and in a wired way show it like a story Can't wait for the next episodes while it come I'll go back and see some other older videos this channel has gold
Woo! I found a video about what Episode 3 will be about from the WSJ from 14 years ago. Still, this was a nice episode and can't wait for EPisode 3 from you.
I literally just replaced the hard drive in my 1000 HE with a cheap Silicon Power 256gb SSD. I tried Win10 for kicks and its fine. My usual OS on it is Mint, which is excellent on this machine, because I do actually still use it. I take it camping a lot where i mostly use it for word processing and spreadsheet editing, but I do read PDFs with it and watch videos on it. The neat thing about it is it runs directly off of 12 volts from a standard car cigarette plug, which is great because my tent trailer also has a 12 volt battery! The damn thing won't die. The battery life is still 6 hours. It's probably the best purchase I ever made in terms of portable gear.
![I bet YOUR photo printer couldn't do this! [Olympus P330]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZIrQX5bvzow/mqdefault.jpg)
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](/img/n.gif)
Last time it was 13". This time it's 8". Will the next ideal laptop size be even smaller? Tune in to the next episode to find out!
...i do have the htc shift x9500 coming up at some point,
ASUS proved with the original Eee PC that 7" is just big enough to get the job done, you just won't really enjoy it.
The ideal laptop size is the Atari Portfolio
That's exactly what I was gonna say 😂😂😂
I bet Dana Sibera can help.
I feel like there's a computer equivalent of an escape room in that operating system, where the goal is to escape into the file system and call for help.
So what you're saying is, we should have an Express Gate CTF. I like your thinking
Perfectly describes the experience of trying to do anything useful from a windows recovery usb
@@tomysshadowi’m going to make it, i have the installer, i am going to get it booting on qemu, and do that
@@beepyshenanigans You are the best of us.
@@ian_b lol
I had to install ChromeOS on my grandma's old laptop so she wouldn't be as vulnerable to scams and viruses. I could see ExpressGate making a comeback but targeted at children and the elderly.
would'nt chromeOS be seen as the sucessor to expressGate tho?
Express gate and Splash top are embedded Linux distros. Chrome os is a full linux distribution it uses some GPU drivers.
I'll still scam her...
@@taruxy ChromeOS is more or less a stripped version of linux, which includes a number of CLI utilities but is otherwise just the chrome browser.
Flashing ChromeBooks i've started just using GalliumOS on everything due to sound driver fighting, and it's very quick and is a full Linux Distro.
Is a great idea until you have to run that one program that thing insist they need. Currently have a guy who really shouldn't be on windows doesn't want to be on windows in his afraid that Microsoft is altering everything on his computer with every update and deleting files. Yet he is so hard stuck in outlook an old version of Outlook!
I remember Express Gate. It was actually pretty cool. A secret 2nd operating system. I used it to look at porn when I was way too young. My dad had no way of finding my Express Gate search history.
Sneaky...
I guess it was used for that way more than for legit stuff 😁
You were playing 5d chess
my friend saw the word express gate on the vid and immediately went into the closet to grab a motherboard that has the words "express gate" on it and showed it to me very enthusiastically. He said he was able to access windows files system with that one and got rid of a directory that prevented him from booting into windows ( possibly virus?). Perhaps it is the cloud version that was able to do this, so I'm very excited to see the upcoming videos. So far this series has been a blast and I basically click on the videos as soon as I see the notification on patreon!
That has to have been the most expensive linux live CD in history!
@@spitefulwari mean, if you're building a desktop computer you're going to have to buy a motherboard, so at that point express gate is basically free
Ok. Ok. Everyone has a strong bad but nobody has a good strong bad ... That was an astoundingly good strong bad.. he absolutely nailed that voice... I get it. We've all had 25 years to hone our strong bads... But that was small batch artisanal... That was aged in oak barrels... That was bought by a collector who never shuts up about it.
"no laptop should be larger than 13 inches"
"no laptop should be larger than 8 inches"
Excited for him to pull out like a palm pilot for the third escalation of this bit
"no laptop should be larger than inches"
The final installment in this series will be a flip phone.
What is this, a laptop for ants?!
@p.a.x That's what workstations are for.
Mine is 7.1 inches and legendary
The minute you mentioned that we could have had Linux based system utilities on so many motherboards my brain exploded. Even as a windows user that would have been amazing and could have helped so many users out. It's crazy that never happened!
Just boot into the IME or PSP
@@HappyBeezerStudios PSP?
The GNU core utilities which come with literally every GNU/linux distribution are incredibly useful, but it's been 50 years or something so no one outside of the linux user base knows about them.
The one I use most is dd. dd will write an iso image to flash memory with no hassle nor silly questions. It's the simplest, quickest, most reliable way I've found to make bootable USBs of almost anything. And it's been a thing since the '70s. I felt cheated when I discovered it 😅
@@233kosta I also heard dd is good for recovering data from dying drives.
@@jackkraken3888 Yeh, it'll take a raw image of pretty much anything. Read errors and all.
About the broken motherboards: that USB port overcurrent error is often caused by one of the jumpers that switch a set of USB ports between regular power and standby power being missing. It has happened to me on an ASUS AMD board not much newer than yours, and adding the missing jumper fixed it.
huh! That's bizarre, I wish I'd known about it - I mean, these boards are trash anyway, but it would have saved me a little bit of money making this ep, haha.
I actually did use ExpressGate on my Asus laptop in college a little bit!! Before everyone had a smartphone, it was actually useful to quickly check my email between classes when my laptop was already shut down. But then in junior year I got a smartphone, and that use case became completely unnecessary. I always thought it was novel technology that was just too limited in its use cases.
And the level of info is crazy!
I had exactly the same experience 😅
Surprisingly, Skype were told by these express boot manufactures to produce a Linux based version of the software literally just for this.
i used to run the linux version of skype for a few years, i think a few years after this was relevant. thats funny.
So we have this to "thank" for Skype on Linux? That's pretty amazing
@@thehobnob Yup.
Did this end when Microsoft bought them?
CERN heavily relied on Skype on Linux for their internal comms for years. I know my lab in USF did too back in the Skype days. I can't believe that so much of the fabric of communication in science labs primarily running Linux desktops, to talk to their Windows overlords, was powered by...ASUS shipping a cut-down Linux distro on all their motherboards. Thanks, ASUS? Thasus?
Man I kind of love the theoretical idea of all motherboards having like 8-32gb of eMMC storage for a small fast Linux partition to act as either a quick boot or recovery os. Back before SSDs I could see like a full fast booting Linux being a great thing when you just need to search or edit something fast but I don't want to make a sandwich while I wait for my computer to boot. Probably would of helped Linux be more popular then it is. Shame nothing like that ever happened.
99.9% sure Microsoft would have prevented that from happening on a massive scale, if not already. Maybe that's the reason why all of this was a marketing failure: it was (forcibly) by design.
I had an ASUS M4N98TD that lasted me from around 2010 to 2020 when it finally started acting strange. I had to look at the manual to see if it had Express Gate and according to the online copy I was reading it did. In the entire time I was using it, I was completely unaware of it even existing.
Same damn thing. I would seen EXPRESSGATE during boot, but always thought it was some be firmware addition to the BIOS.
Unfortunately I was right in the wrong way
Thanks Gravis
I had the same mobo with a phenom II 965 back in 2011
I had an X58 board that had that as a child (hand-me-down). I think I remember it being a bios option and maybe using it's web browser when I being young and dumb broke my dual boot Linux / Win7 setup (I don't do this, I use WSL because I'm lazy). I'm actually using an Asus board (B450 TUF or something like this), and have had zero problems with any of them. Given the whole X3D CPU's literally cooking themselves, esp on Asus boards (although this is the highest-end stuff), maybe not the highest end stuff.
@@TheAcadianGuy I had a Phenom II X6 1090T. Now I have a 4-core Ryzen. Whee!
Intel Macs have an actually useful version of this, the firmware has the ability to connect to the internet, download a recovery OS into RAM and then live boot it from RAM. You could access a full terminal, mount the disk if it was working, reinstall the OS, and access a modern working version of Safari. It is so nice never needing to flash an install USB to reinstall. It also allowed me to keep working when the boot drive failed completely. I dont know why nobody has implimented this for windows, it seems like it could be built into the BIOS since it would just need to download the recovery OS, not store it.
That is cool AF.
Some newer Dell Optiplexes I’ve worked with have this sort of feature (“SupportAssist OS Recovery”) but I haven’t seen it on any consumer-level kit (probably for OS licensing reasons)
uh you do know every mobo can boot from LAN? or from NFS.
@@ChrisWijtmans for sure. But not every mobo can boot from LAN, connect to 's recovery image server and download an OS when there's no disk/a damaged disk present.
I don't think most folks are hosting their own WDS/MDT server anyway :P
This is an advantage to having a unified hardware / software vendor. That said, I've never used it. I just maintain a library of installers on CD/DVD/SD, going back to 10.0, because I assumed it would fail to work about three years after the computer was released.
It wouldn't be _impossible_ to do something similar for Windows or Linux -- it would just have to go through a hardware detection process and download the appropriate drivers as well (assuming it had them.) Not quite as elegant as having a "this model = this image" thing on the server.
I had Express Gate on a socket 775 board, and it actually came in handy. My hard drive died and while I was waiting for it to be RMA'd, I used the chat/pidgin app and browser. It wasn't great, but it was better than nothing.
pidgin... I haven't heard that name in a loooong time...
It feels like almost a crime to not add a more useful version of Linux on the motherboard, and this is coming from a Windows user.
@@sobolanul96 I still use pidgin daily!
I used this heavily during the win 7 era for battery savings while traveling when I only needed a browser and Skype.
To be clear this was on a laptop and branded as splashtop if memory serves.
I love that this channel is the Technology Collections of the hardware-software niche. Great vid as always :)
It occupies a comfy spot between LGR and Technology Connections.
@@glitchedoom Right? And it's so bloody jam packed with info!
Technology Collections focusses more on 80s 70s and older tech while crd focusses in 90s and 2000s tech.
Holy trinity of channels: Technology Connections for electronics till 80' and analog tech, LGR for 80-90' pc and oddware and CRD for early 2000. Imagine a collab of them togheter
LGR has a vaguely uncomfortable feeling that the others (except *maybe* oddity archive) don't have
I did boot this once off an Asus motherboard, thought to myself "neat", then never looked at it again and forgot it existed. Excellent coverage of this fascinating artifact.
I absolutely adore your dedication to bring us this series about a feature that nobody ever cared about and probably never will.
And I certainly won't miss one second of it, because you make it interesting and accessible.
It reminds me of the engine teardowns on I do Cars that i am absolutely addicted to.
It was today that I found out the motherboard I have been using for the past TWELVE YEARS has EG built in, and I consider myself a prime example of a nerd. If it wasn't for "never change a running system" I would love to figure out how to boot that up und have a play with it, just to see what I could have been actively ignoring all those years.
I used Express Gate for exactly what you just spoke about: to let someone, usually a family member, to use my computer to look things up on the internet.
My man, you can make literally the most mundane, overlooked hardware and software into truly entertaining videos. I'm really happy to see how much your channel is growing. It's very well-deserved.
This was a fun video! You're really getting your narration/presentation style shined up, even with such an arcane and dry topic. It's cool to see how your videos are evolving over time. Keep at it. :D
This guy can tell a story about grass growing and I would be like hmmm‽ I did not know Oregon was the grass capital of the continent.
@@Xsiondu Sure it is, for a flexible definition of "grass."
Yes, he's becoming better and better at it
I distinctly remember using something like this once when after putting together a new build and discovering I couldn't boot into Windows, I used the web browser feature to look things up for tech support and join an IRC channel with a web-based client. At that point in time, before I had a smartphone and access to the Internet even if my computer was down, it was really handy to have to be able to look up how to fix something.
Two episodes in, and this is already one of my favorite tech-related video series!
This is epic, like half of the computer in the library I used to go to in my childhood have this silly thing because Asus had a strong foothold in government computer service in my region since it's a domestic brand, being some 8 year old without any jacksh!t knowledge about either English or computer, we all basically ignored it and proceed to wait about 5 minute for it to boot windows XP.
There's a reasonable chance network admins ignored it either and it wouldn't have got working connection.
Makes sense for Taiwan. Visited there a decade ago since the Chinese (moved there after CCP) half of my family lived there. Don't remember seeing too much Asus, although we didn't go to tech places because me and my dad (not the Chinese side) are the only computer people in our family. Ironically I had one of those boards as a child (hand-me-down), and may have used ExpressGate, albeit as a child (middle/secondary school, hand-me-down) who had no business dual booting Linux and Windows.
I forgot about pidgin! Also a homestar reference?! I love this channel, reminds me of when I was doing tech support when XP was the most common operating system but Vista was creeping in and we all hated it. Some customers' computers seemed completely unable to function, and now I'm realizing that while there was a level of technical ineptitude that made most calls painful, the state of machines and operating systems in this time definitely didn't help! Legitimately interesting history imo!
I helped a few older people roll back to XP. I hated it, everyone hated it it seems.
Pidgin still exists!
I did unironically use Splashtop OS (The unbranded version) and cared enough to both preserve it and make an offline installer for it.
Unfortunately when I sent it to CRD it was to late for this video, but he does have access to a version of Splashtop that from memory uses Google Chrome instead and can be installed on any brand.
Sony uses splashtop in their early 2010s pcs. It either had a browser only (firefox 3 based, im not even joking) or apparantly had a word processor built in. Idk why they had 2 solutions (last video wasnt splashtop). This was fantastic for people who didn't have access to their home computer outside of supervised time. (I only had my dad's pc in the house and it had a password). I used it heavily when I was grounded and didnt have my school laptop. I could watch youtube via any site that supported youtube embeds, so stuff like cleartube was great. idk why it was like that. I could order pizza from it (only papa johns worked, nothing else).
It's Firefox 3 because major version numbers only came with big jumps and changes every few years, but minor revisions and security updates still happened about as often as they did. After Firefox 4 released did they change to the *every change needs a new version* method, otherwise we'd probably be in Firefox 5 after the migration that happened around the v67 (I think).
yeah, i remember trying firefox 4 beta, it was a huge deal, and not very well recieved
It was great on the EEE PC line as EG was so light it even made theAMD Bobcat snappy. Ironically my EEE PC is now running Q4OS which is a hell of a lot like Express Gate as far as look and feel but more functional of course.
I had the P5Q-E motherboard. I loved that machine, it was a beast for the time with my heavily overclocked Q6600 and dual Radeon 4850's.
oh boi, I had a p5q-e as well.
@@theholyviper I mentioned this as a comment in his last video. But one time, I reinstalled windows and since that deleted the Express Gate installation, my PC would start up and just get stuck at a black screen because it was looking for Express Gate which wasn't there. It took me weeks to figure out the problem. I tried replacing the CMOS batter and my PC booted up just fine, then if I tried to reboot it wouldn't work. So I figured out removing and reinserting the CMOS battery would let it boot once. From there I figured out it was because it was loading default BIOS settings. Then after tinkering with the BIOS I figured out Express Gate was the problem.
I still rock a Q6600 with a HD6850 as a spare machine.
i had p5ql-epu (i guess it still somewhere but capacitors are in bad condition)
@@lvl90dru1d There are Asus P5QLs that have bad caps. But, the P5QL Pro has pretty much what you usually see on motherboards now.
In roughly this era, maybe a bit later, I had a Netbook (Asus, I believe) that I mostly used as a media player for my commutes. Fortunately, I had pretty good luck with Hibernate with it (I've usually had pretty good luck with Windows Hibernate). I remember noticing the device offering a system like this that included media player functionality. I tried it one time. I found it took longer to boot than restore from Hibernate. And the media player was complete garbage. I remember questioning it's existence at the time. Update after watching the video: I believe it was almost certainly this software and my memory of "garbage media player" was probably actually "oh, there's no media player."
If you find it interesting I'd enjoy a video giving some tips for a younger person trying to begin in the hobby of collecting old tech. It's a bit daunting and I'm constantly looking for guidance and motivation. Thank you for considering it. I love your channel.
22:23 Can confirm, my main desktop for a VERY long time ran on an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution, which featured ExpressGate. I think I used it once just to make sure it actually worked in the last 10+ years of owning/using that PC.
I used express gate once to get on the internet to figure out a booting problem. Once that was solved I never went back into it. It also looked a lot newer than that from what I remember.
Saw your writeups on this stuff. I'm happy to see this investigation ended up in a video.
The black magic they've done in some of the instant on stuff is wild.
How have I not discovered this channel sooner, the jokes are fresh, the topics are intriguing, and the quality is better than most tech mainstream channels.
I look forward to watching your videos!
Loved seeing the Asus and Lenovo netbooks on your channel, I have a soft spot for netbooks, I had an MSI Wind u100 back in 2009, and I loved it. There’s something charming about them, even though they were severely underpowered and were taken over by iPads and when ultrabook sized laptops became the standard.
All the tech wizard teachers in my old high school had them, and some of em refused to use Windows and were full on Linux.
Believe it or not, i'm watching and writing this on a netbook with an N270. Straight from the era. I managed to force Chromium to use GMA950 for accelerated compositing, blur effects and whatnot. Linux of course.
MSI Wind i remember they seemed nice, though realistically they were all kind of eerily similar. I think my favourite MSI is not a netbook though but S262/S271 Megabook barebone, older but modest upper class.
Reading the articles for this on your website was one of the wildest rides I've had on the Internet.
A handful of years ago I had an MSI motherboard that also had this quick-boot thing but it was optional; I remember it being rather late for this sort of thing (it was a Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge board). It was, regrettably, basically just Splashtop again. I kinda want to play around with it but my sister now uses it for her PC and I don't want to make like I'm going to see her then proceed to ignore her and play on her computer instead.
you can just tell her about ahwt you're gonna do in advance, 'I just need to check something I left here real quick'
Reading article about ADHD on his website, - was the most helpful piece of media in my life, period. I have ADHD and it helped take my life in order
Got an Asus board right now with that installed, Would love to get it out and play with it.
Wait, THAT'S what those buttons on the old HPs did? My high school gave us surprisingly high-end Elitebooks back in the day, and despite a lot of us kids regularly managing to make those things do things they definitely weren't supposed to do... I'm pretty sure literally none of us ever discovered those functions. I doubt anyone in the school ever did, even the IT people who bought and imaged the machines. Fascinating.
EDIT: I just looked on eBay and for some reason those old first-generation EliteBooks are still >$100?? I can see the higher-end ones being usable, but the lower-end ones often had dual-core CPUs...
Gravis,most of the topics you are talking about in your films i couldn't care less about, but anyway i watch every one from start to finish with a lot of enjoyment
You have the talent to talk about that 😀
18:21 I do remember some 90s bios having mouse support and even an integrated UI, I thought it was odd that it was discontinued, until recently like you mentioned.
Some even had BIOS themes.
Really ? I never came across one unfortunately.
thats what UEFI basically is. Its a UI and there is a console too that not many know about. Also UEFI loads firmware from device and passes it to the OS... which is a massive security breach but whatever.
@@Gatorade69And there was another one that looks just like Windows UI th-cam.com/video/u20v8592v2c/w-d-xo.html
I bought my laptops used with a broken OS, so most of these extra buttons were a mystery I didn't care much about. They are nice to have if your macro recorder program can detect them.
Nicely thought out series, complete with cliff-hanging previews😀👍👍
Sony Vaio's also had their own splashtop os called Quick Web Access, which was basically the same. But one of my dell inspirons has something called MediaGate which was some media center thing made by Cyberlink and it ran on Windows XP but it booted a lot quicker
The only thing I Kno the media button for is that my Vaio laptop had some annoying bloatware bug that would cause it to leak handles and crash after a day - unless you pressed that button, which didn't do anything else
@@thewhitefalcon8539 That's real weird. On mine it just booted into the Splashtop OS
Huge hype, and I have really been enjoying this series. Can't wait for the rest of it!
You've easily become one of my favorite creators on the whole platform. I love obscure tech deep dives like this. Keep up the really excellent work, you've improved a ton since you started!
XP was so common on those Netbooks because Microsoft gave away the licenses for about $30 if the machine fell under certain criteria for screen size, CPU and RAM. I think at the time they were planning to stop selling XP, but recognized Vista was still too heavy for those budget machines. When I ran the original Acer Aspire One for a few years back then, a clean install of XP was pretty snappy on the Atom CPU, but even back then I wondered why Microsoft didn't just try to make a slimmed down version of Vista for machines like this if they were all practically running the same Atom chipset.
I just found your channel from a link in a reddit comment explaining what that wierd button on his old Dell laptop did, and I really liked your channel. More authentic than LTT.
Funnily enough, I was just using Splashtop before watching this. The modern one though. I didn't know it was related to whats on these old laptops. Weird to reuse the name, but it is a good one.
I used both Splashtops in the past. Both OS and remote desktop program. Both personal and business. I recommend RustDesk as an open source alternative.
you're really spoling us with these many videos in a month wow thank you 😭
Loving this series so far!
17:30 QQ is actually the most popular IM software in China then and still is one of the more widely used nowadays (made by tencent, one of the biggest tech company in China and around the world). It's never marketed outside of China though so ASUS or DeviceVM probably supported it specifically for the Chinese market
I was recently surprised to find a very clanky very basic efi boot implementation on an early AM3 board, it takes much longer than MBR to boot but still does work with any modern OS and even NVME drives before they were invented.
I remember using “Wubi” to install Ubuntu as a special section of my Windows filesystem, which I imagine worked much like that installable ExpressGate you showed off. But of course that gave me a full copy of Ubuntu I could run (which absolutely booted faster than my junky Windows install that I really should’ve cleaned up)
Your comment on how that issue with the Chip could be the Current Monitoring circuit failing and causing the USB warning message might have just helped me realize something about an issue we're having with some components at work, will post an update if this was actually the case
I'm actually having a different issue I randomly get the hardware add/remove sound in Windows 10. Any ideas what it could be?
@@jackkraken3888 That could be a number of things unfortunately. For us, we have our own boards and stuff, and Im trying to troubleshoot something with that, not just navigating windows stuff
I remember this! Well, not just remember, I still have a pc using a motherboard with Asus Express Gate as a feature. It's an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 if I remember correctly. I always immediately disabled it myself because I needed faster access to the bios for my overclocks, but when I saw the last video I figured it was the exact kind of strange semi-OS you were looking for.
Lo and behold, here's the video on it!
Update after starting the video: Well goddamn, there it is! There's the motherboard! God tier motherboard for the time. Pushed the Xeon I slapped in it all the way up to 4.4 Ghz no problem.
I actually used that for a while, and then, of course there were no updates to expressgate ever, which meant in the end, after loosing all IM support even back in the day, the only thing that somewhat worked was the browser... The motherboard I had at the time was an ASUS P6X58D-E.
43:45 If you are wondering yes SDUSD still does that and I'm sure it's laser etched.
Very cool for emergency OS to restore your main OS, if only they just let you flash some ultra small distro on your own
I mean, Windows comes with a small 'emergency' OS to restore your main OS, built into your main OS (safe mode). Another failsafe is using the instal DVD/USB, it can be used to fix practically any damaged Windows installation. Next up is some WindowsPE on a USB stick with special recovery tools (or the same on a Linux Live CD/USB).
@@someguy4915 yeah but look, what if you screw up your EFI partition and don't have another pc then you are screwed, you can't download any other os to make that recovery USB stick and like keeping that USB at hand all the time is unrealistic, like I have dozens of SD cards floating around as I put them into things I sell and yet I don't have any SD with recovery os just couple of weird firmware copy cards and one with clean windows image and clonezilla
@@give_me_my_nick_back True, but if you're messing with your boot partition you probably should already prepare by making a recovery partition on your SSD or a USB stick.
Keeping a USB stick at hand is unrealistic? How, unless you're destroying your boot partition on your laptop while on a plane, you're at home, open the drawer and there is the USB stick :P
If you lost the USB stick, the cat broke it or you never made one, you can borrow one from the neighbors. If the neighbors won't talk to you you can ask a friend.
Either way you should be able to get a Windows USB within 30 minutes or so, usually by just opening your 'junk drawer'.
The idea of some failsafe 'OS' to recover the main one sounds nice, but for most issues such an embedded OS is far too limited and for the tasks that an embedded OS is suitable there's a hundred (better/easier/...) alternatives already.
Basically, I'd hazard a guess that you can find forum posts and TH-cam videos on how to recover your EFI partition using the Windows installer while I doubt there'll be anything on how to do the same while on Expressgate :P
@@someguy4915 Safe mode isn't a mini OS. It's just running the OS without drivers enabled. Great if drivers are the problem, but not very useful otherwise.
No, the emergency OS to restore your OS is called Recovery Mode. Though Windows 10 even discourages that and instead encourages you to use automated repair.
@@ZipplyZane Obviously Safe mode isn't a literal mini-OS... Just like a full Linux Live CD with rescue tools isn't very mini either...
Besides that, safe mode is useful for driver issues, security issues (mainly certificate/signing related), software issues, registry mess ups, and so on, not just driver issues.
Recovery Mode isn't an OS either btw...
I have owned or had to work on numerous HP Elitebook 8540 laptops for friends and coworkers in the past; very popular laptop in the refurb space because, like you said, at the time it was released the HP Elitebook 8440p was a beast of a machine and was still a serviceable business laptop 3-5 years down the line (especially if you drop in a 2.5" SSD).
Presumably, it had the same HP QuickWeb on it that you found in the Elitebook 8440... and yet, I never knew this existed. Of course once you've put in an SSD, you would be a fool to use it; Windows 7 on an SSD would load at pretty much the same speed but with a full Windows feature set. Good finds--all of these Vista/HDD busting gimmicks--and I appreciate you running this series.
Yooo, just wanted to say it's crazy to see how this channel grew from not even 10k subs in a basement to basically a Technology Connections but different. Well deserved!
True
This is spectacular. I'm captivated and I never even saw any of this stuff back in the day because I guess I either bought laptops that were too good, or desktop parts that were too low-end.
If they just put up a terminal ExpressGate could easily have been the most talked about thing on tech forums of the day and brought ASUS a surprising amount of business. The near-miss here is painful.
Also, love the meme video cut-ins. This Is Rock And Roll indeed.
It's not often that I finish watching an hour-long TH-cam video and think "damn, I wish this kept going for another hour". Really looking forward to the next part! Great job. You reminded me that I have an old P7P55D motherboard with ExpressGate. When I first got it and build a pc with it I remember entering into EG and thinking "huh, this is neat". And then I never used it again.
I remember seeing Express Gate on the motherboard of the first PC I built (Windows 7 era) and just assuming it was marketing nonsense about booting into Windows faster. I never saw the "click an app" splash screen, I wonder if it was disabled by default on my model.
Props for balancing audio and not having an intro/ outro and still producing great content. If I make the mistake of leaving autoplay on my queue (other creators) on I hear about it from the better half the next day
I assume you mean the loud flashy music intros and outros and yeah, one of the few criticisms I'll happily level, even at the people I respect on youtube, is over this. I have no idea what they're supposed to accomplish and I'm *positive* they drive people away. not a large number, but still, I just don't know what the plus side is supposed to be to make up for it.
That's insane. I had that exact motherboard and two BFG 8800GTS OC cards in SLI. That computer was such a piece of junk. I was constantly fixing it. I must have turned off Express Gate in the BIOS because I don't remember this at all. Or was that the Asus P5NE-SLI motherboard I also had? I can't remember which one had the BFG cards. I definitely had the P6T Deluxe but I think mine was an original, not a v2. Anyway, yeah, I probably disabled it so that I could skip the 10 seconds during boot that it waits for you to pick an option before carrying on to Windows. I knew I'd never use it so why add those seconds to my boot?
Wait. Maybe it was just one 8800gts oc and the other Asus board I had was running two GTX280s. Man. I cannot remember. One of them had an SLI setup and it's tempting to say it was the board with SLI in the name but I don't think it was. It doesn't matter, I guess. The point is I had that same Asus motherboard and I turned off Express Gate the very first time I ever turned it on and never looked back.
It makes me so happy every time the "Two of Them" bit (or some variation of it) shows up, I just love it so much!
Regarding linux boot times, my eMachines e350 was managing to boot my full fat Ubuntu install circa 2010 or whatever in perhaps 10 or 15 seconds. It was absurdly fast compared to 7 starter, even though it was booting from a garbage 4500rpm spinner. I still have the machine, maybe I ought to try archlinux32 on it ...
This is a video that among its many gems lets me know someone else appreciates a good “have my main man Edgar drop a train on ‘em” reference
The HP QuickWeb looks exactly like the Splashtop option my Vaio has. Mine has a physical "WEB" button, though.
I still love my ee-pc and I even did surgery on it to get a new fan in there. It now runs a SSD too.
And still, only time I knew it has something expressy was when I disabled the prompt in the bios to get it to boot faster. Never knew what it was. WOW!
I feel like I have to defend having a spinny drive as OS/Only drive, mostly as a cautionary tale.
This is my first homebuilt PC, I wanted a SSD in it for the OS, but because my My Music/My Video/My Documents is absolutely massive, I wanted to know how to do that thing where your Userfiles are on a separate drive from your OS, which I knew was possible because a old school laptop had that, despite only having 1 HDD which was split in 2 partitions.
Unfortunately whenever I asked I just got insulted for not even knowing the name of what I tried to achieve. So I gave up.
Then I got 2 big HDD's and tried to RAID mirror them so I would at least have a hot spare at any time. Still with the OS drives, that also didn't work and only found that out too late.
Moral of the story, don't be a dick to people trying to learn since they will try dumb things since they haven't learned a thing.
Yea the nerds can be really obnoxious against novice pc users. that is why i gave up on learning coding
This is the series I never knew I wanted. Keep up the good work!
Wow I remember this. I booted it once, laughed, and promptly forgot about it :)
Great forensics in this video dude! Love the depth you went into this.
Owned this exact HP Elitebook as my main home computer for more than 5 years, never knew it had the quick start!
I recall launching the browser portion, ONCE, just to see what it was offering. Now older machines sometimes had a version of BASIC, and while my PC's were busy running memory tests which slowed the boot process considerably, the Tandy Colour Computer (I have the model 3) will flash the screen momentarily and then be ready to accept commands. ROM cartridges, when used, give the impression of a games console of the era, and get you into your software fairly quickly. It's taken us a while to get back to a place where they can reach a useable state in a matter of seconds.
Dude.. I can't believe you pulled out the P6T Deluxe V2! That was my main motherboard for almost a decade. I ran an intel i7-920 overclocked to 3.2Ghz on watercooling. It was the greatest thing ever I loved that thing. Still have it, still runs like a charm.
Being the owner of several Asus laptops and motherboards in my youth I thank you for helping explain this feature to me. Although I never got to use it since I did not have any Internet connection until at least the 10's.
Video was entertaining and informative and also I enjoyed your Strong Bad impression, thank you
Thank you for the Strong Bad impression. I needed that today. Great video!
“Double Bass!” *cue bafflingly, yet impressive crazy keyboard drum solo that he was way more excited and proud of than the tone of the creative keyboard demonstration ever called for…
…And I absolutely love every second of this wacky creative keyboard drum demonstration video, it brings back memories! You can just tell how much he always wanted to be a rockstar, and damn it! He is not going to miss this one chance to show off, and be a rockstar, for at least this one moment, even if it’s for a silly charmingly stilted Creative keyboard product video… 😆
one of my buddies gave me a PC that he got from a thrift store for 20 dollars, that I've been in the process of repurposing to give to one of my friends. it's a machine circa 2010 with a core i7 920 and an Asus p6t motherboard. every time it boots up there's a message that briefly appears on screen about express gate, and you're absolutely right that it lives in the back of your head because I never thought about it until seeing this video randomly show up in my recommendations
been almost 2 weeks, getting excited for the next episode in the series to drop :)
Back in the early 2000's I always wondered why no motherboard brand included an internal usb-stick with drivers. Nothing was more frustrating than installing Windows just to find out that the network driver isn't included so you can't connect to the internet and download it.
ExpressGate seems like a really nice feature if your OS doesn't boot and you need to search for the issue or you need to download a driver.
damn bro, I listened to you talk about quick boot up linux in a mobo that no one ever used or cared about for an hour! good job
A colleague of mine had an old eepc. It was old when he had it in 2012. It was still handy. He’d long wiped xp off of it and bunged Linux on it. It was more than fast enough for his needs, and it was small enough that he could shove it in a bag. He still got reasonable battery life.
Dude, I love this series so much. My sister had an Eee PC back then for school. I ended up inheriting it and trying to convert it to a lightweight Ubuntu thing, but I (at, like 11 - 13yo) was struggling too much to fix some motherboard issues it had.
Love your videos! I bet none of us get to talk about this stuff much in our lives, nice to geek out with some fellow Model-M lovers :)
I always appreciate a good Homestar reference
I had an Asus laptop from the very end of the ExpressGate era, and used it a grand total of 3 times. Once when I installed the extra stuff it needed to see WTF it actually was. Once when a friend asked why my laptop had two power buttons to show them, and once to log into my university's coursework submission system 2 minutes before deadline to submit queued work (the 2 minute boot time for Windows would have killed me). I think I had that laptop for 8 years.
So... I timed the Toughbook today. 2 minutes, 33 seconds from dead cold (I don't have that "Fast Startup" doo-doo on, it causes more problems than it's worth) to fully operational (Logged in, on the desktop, Steam started up and at my library page, Discord logged in and active, Firefox open).
Then again, I did learn patience from my previous rig. That was a heavy-duty workstation rig with twin CPUs that would take 30 seconds to get going _before_ the BIOS splash screen showed up. Then it slogged along through a RAID controller and finally started loading Windows 7. At that point, it was at the mercy of a 10k RPM box of spinning rust. It was a very slow boot process, but it was worth it in the end for a very fast system.
That said, I couldn't imagine going through all of that lingering, slow boot-up, only to then have a slow-as-frozen-molasses system afterward.
I have been benging your videos since I saw the first episodes when it got recommend
I love how you take a technology issue and in a wired way show it like a story
Can't wait for the next episodes while it come I'll go back and see some other older videos this channel has gold
Your laptop's and your topics.... are getting smaller and more niche. And I'm here for it 100% 👍🤘
Woo! I found a video about what Episode 3 will be about from the WSJ from 14 years ago. Still, this was a nice episode and can't wait for EPisode 3 from you.
I left a comment about this featre under the video about the Vaio laptop, glad to see you covered it :)
i love how you've been tending to put more references in your videos
I literally just replaced the hard drive in my 1000 HE with a cheap Silicon Power 256gb SSD. I tried Win10 for kicks and its fine. My usual OS on it is Mint, which is excellent on this machine, because I do actually still use it. I take it camping a lot where i mostly use it for word processing and spreadsheet editing, but I do read PDFs with it and watch videos on it. The neat thing about it is it runs directly off of 12 volts from a standard car cigarette plug, which is great because my tent trailer also has a 12 volt battery! The damn thing won't die. The battery life is still 6 hours. It's probably the best purchase I ever made in terms of portable gear.