Express Gate
Asus plans to include Express Gate on all its motherboards, so it's fitting to see the instant-on OS make an appearance in the Eee Box. Express Gate is a pre-OS desktop environment filled with the bare essentials, providing access to the most basic apps without booting into Windows.

Express Gate can be quickly booted when you turn the Eee Box on, and it offers a decent amount of configurability and four main options: a web surfing application that appears to be an implementation of Firefox, a chat and IM application in the form of Pidgin, a photo manager remarkably well-linked to your Windows installation, and Skype.

Again, pushing the idea of the Eee Box as a potential multimedia device, I went ahead and visited YouTube. Happily, videos again played back stutter-free, reinforcing my suspicions that the hitching I experienced in Internet Explorer was chiefly that browser's fault.

Express Gate's photo manager is fairly novel, though it runs a bit sluggishly and takes a little time to load thumbnails for the images in a given directory. The app can read images from anything you plug into the Eee Box, and uploading to Flickr requires just the click of a button, which is a great touch.

The one real hitch I experienced with Express Gate was wireless connectivity. For some odd reason, the software was able to find just about every wireless router in range except for mine. In fairness, though, my router is a bit of a temperamental piece of hardware (a Linksys WRT54G v5 configured to use WPA-PSK), so I'm not apt to hold this against the Eee Box.

The utility of Express Gate makes a pretty strong case for going with a Linux-based Eee Box as opposed to the Windows version. Windows XP is designed to run on a broad base of PCs, but it may be a little too bloated for something as pared down as the B202. Express Gate is fundamentally a Linux-based operating environment whittled down to fit in just 512MB of flash memory. The fact that it offers a substantial amount of functionality, solid performance, and a pleasing aesthetic make a convincing case for running a more robust Linux installation as your primary operating system.