For those of us who virtually live online, waiting around those few precious minutes for the system to boot into Windows, connect to the Internet and then present the browser is time wasted.
For the last few couple of years, more and more new Windows machines have come pre-loaded with something that boots straight into our beloved online world. Splashtop is a browser-based operating system companion that allows users to get online in seconds after pushing the power button on. Now it’s being made available for public beta download.
Splashtop was introduced in 2007 and has since found itself being pre-installed on millions of laptops and netbooks from companies like Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and LG. It’s a lightweight, web-centric operating system optimized for notebooks and netbooks that takes less than five seconds to load in and get users online.
Now for the first time, a beta download is available to everyone, although it’s currently restricted to just a few supported devices. The company’s Dave Bottoms told Gizmag: “We plan to add broad support for a range of Splashtop-enabled models we’ve already shipped first.”
This is because engineers have already performed much of the testing and tuning necessary for getting Splashtop up and running on the many hardware configurations available.
Once downloaded, the software is loaded in via Windows Installer. During the installation process, Splashtop also imports settings such as time, date, language, location, and bookmarks from Internet Explorer or Firefox. It will also look for any Wi-Fi connection information in the Windows Connection Manager, so that the user can get online as quickly as possible.
If there’s a bad connection, as sometimes happens, or you’re out and about and using hotspots and Splashtop is unable to automatically connect, then you’d be presented with the Connection Manager to scan for available networks or to resolve whatever issue has arisen.
