I flamed the ASUS E35M1-M yesterday in an online forum, but then had second thoughts and deleted my post, because I just don't feel enough certainty to flame, especially when I am unable to find any claims online to back up my own. After all, it is possible that I had two defective motherboards. Defects do happen. And besides, what do I know? I know how to build systems, but my knowledge of hardware is not deep. I could be mistaken, and I don't like slinging mud at one of the few low-energy offerings for desktops besides Intel's Atom.
But here is my hypothesis, to those who are interested, and somehow I do not think I will be the only one.
I have three ASUS E35M1-M motherboards installed in desktop systems, and they have eaten a USB stick containing the OpenElec install, which I referred to an earlier post, as well as a name-brand keyboard and mouse. By "eaten" I mean these devices are no longer operable, will not interact with any of my other computers, are dead, no lights come on, and they are not detected by the BIOS. The cause of their demise was plugging and unplugging these devices into various USB ports on the ASUS E35M1-M. The reason I am suspicious is that three devices is an awful lot to die in the span of twenty-four hours for a small household like mine, and these young devices had been operating without any problems before. The BIOS version on each of the motherboards was 1502, and I notice that ASUS has in September of 2012 released two BIOS updates, with 1602 being said to "improve system stability and improve USB compatibility." Again, I'm not completely sure of what happened, but I do think the motherboard is the most likely culprit here. Stupid ASUS forced me to use USB ports because they only included one lousy PS/2 port. I have PS/2 mice and keyboards, but no, they demand their customers use a USB port, to save a couple pennies on the manufacture of a $199 board.
Needless to mention, I am upgrading all of my BIOSes to 1602 this morning. The ASUS E35M1-M boasts of the new UEFI BIOS, but I did not know how to get either Windows or Linux to install with it. Meanwhile, the manufacturer apparently hadn't worked all the bugs out yet, and so I got the disadvantages without the benefits. I can't recommend this motherboard anymore, but does it matter? AMD discontinued the E-350 chip, so the motherboard has been orphaned.
I think my next motherboard is going to be an Intel motherboard running an Intel chip.
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