Asus g73jh - messed up drivers/utilities/programs, please help

To make a long story short, my hard drive was failing recently, but I didn't recognize that as the problem at the time. As a result the laptop was freezing up. A friend suggested I check/update my drivers in case. I ended up updating my graphics driver, but it turned out to be the wrong driver, and was causing all sorts of graphical problems.

However, when I found what I assumed to be the old driver and installed it, things weren't quite working right. The following symptoms have been happening

-ASUS Utilities aren't loading at startup, and can't be turned on (UPDATE: Utilities were disabled from startup, not an issue anymore)
-Windows photo viewer does not open/work. Attempts to repair it via Windows essential repair fail every time I attempt it.
-Some functions are crashing. For example, if I try to open Firefox troubleshooting information, the program crashes immediately.
-Photoshop, which I use in my daily work, says I do not have administrator access despite being on an administrator account, and that my graphics driver is incorrect

I did not realize I didn't have system restore active when I did this, so I can't revert to an earlier state through that. I do have a system image, but the image is dated summer of last year, and would undo quite a bit of personalization and changes made to the system since then, so I wouldn't want to use that unless I had absolutely no choice.

Does anybody know what I can do to restore functionality to my g73jh?

 

Uninstall the programs and utilities you're having issues with. Use Revo Uninstaller, reboot and possibly defrag the hard drive.

Also check on the health of the hard drive by downloading hard drive sentinel. It's possible you have a bad drive and these are early symptoms.

As for the windows photo viewer you should be able to customize windows features "turn windows features on or off" in programs and features within the control panel.

The admin issue is probably the hardest one. You can try to start in safe mode and make another account that's an administrator. Then log in normally, right click "run as administrator" and provide the new credentials. You can also use ERD Commander to provision local accounts.

Good luck, let us know how it goes.

 

Nothing ended up helping unfortunately.

I discovered part of the issue is my graphics driver STILL isn't the correct driver I had prior to installing the incorrect one. I can't seem to find the one the laptop was factory-installed with

 

Run Display Driver Uninstaller as recommended in link. Download 2 or 3 of the most recent drivers from Nvidia driver page for your graphics card and OS, then test. Run DDU before each new driver you install.

 

It's not Nvidia actually, it's ATI Mobility Radeon

 

Oh'well. DDU is also for AMD graphics. You have downloaded and tried more than one driver from Amd? Use DDU as described in previous post.

 

I have.

Thing is, apparently this laptop doesn't like any drivers that Asus doesn't issue out themselves, even if it's genuine AMD. I tried installing what was listed as the latest graphics driver for this video card and it completely screwed up so many things related to the video driver, in addition to not working right. I'm trying to find the driver that was specifically listed as the factory-install driver, since it was the only thing that genuinely worked

 

Checked Asus Driver dowload page for your model?

 

Older Pre-GCN was entirely OEM driver locked so download the older driver from asus site here https://www.asus.com/my/support/Download/3/252/0/1/8je5Ot4HBnKOdT81/30/
Do a BIOS update first, if its older.
I'm not 100% sure that this latest modded driver would work or not but worth a try. http://leshcatlabs.net/2016/05/30/leshcats-catalyst-16-2-1-unifl-and-lts/

 

This is still going on?

End all solution.... buy a cheap SSD and load windows on it. If the drivers work then it's your OS causing issues. If the drivers don't work then it's hardware related.

You can get a older crucial 120gb ssd for around $30-40 shipped. I can provide the windows images if you need them. This way you stop guessing what could be wrong and you don't lose any of your data.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Crucial-M50...Solid-State-Drive-CT120M500SSD1-/122743055144

Though I suspect the GPU has cold solder points in the bga and is causing this issue.

 

None of this is the solution, although this has become a non issue in light of changes, thanks still