Express Gate:
Recent motherboard releases have been including a feature called Express Gate. In the past I have usually just disabled it in the BIOS and never given it a second thought. This time around I decided to set it up and see what it was about.
If you enable Express Gate in the BIOS and install the software package you will be greeted with the screen depicted in the below left image. You can customize the timeout length of this screen to meet your desires, and I left it at the default of 10 seconds which means if you don't touch a key within 10 seconds the computer boots normally. I didn't have USB mouse support at this screen, but did have USB keyboard support. The below right image shows the screen you are greeted with if you choose Web at the main splash screen. I have the configuration options window open over the top of the web browser to give you an idea of the available configuration options.
Pictured below we see the web browser, which appears to be a stripped down version of Firefox. The browser has the necessary plugins to play flash games and deliver audio, but the audio output was very distorted and scratchy through the S/PDIF optical out port to my receiver and forced me to mute it. I do not have a microphone installed and couldn't test the Skype functionality, but Chat worked fine.
Express Gate is an interesting feature that has the potential to very useful, but at this point I don't feel like it's ready for prime time. I like the fact that you can't access your hard drive while in the Express Gate environment, but that USB thumb drives were detected and accessible. This is great for viewing pictures, but I can't help but notice that MP3 audio files saved on the USB key were not playable. There are hundreds of flash games available on the game screen, but many are simple and not very engaging. I like the idea, but work needs to be done to weed out the more mind numbing flash games. It appears that ASUS has added some sort of disk utilities option to Express Gate, but to my extreme disappointment it wasn't supported on my installation. A media player and usable disk utility would make Express Gate a much more appealing application.
