Defected from Dellware to ROG

A little over a year ago, after returning from Iraq, I bought an Alienware M17X (R1) from Dell. This was the first series of Alienware that Dell produced and I was lucky enough that for the first two months, I had Alienware support (meaning avid gamer types who spoke English and had a fairly good clue as what they were talking about). And I loved it, that laptop rocked.

The support didn't though. Trying to get a second drive was a joke, configuring RAID 0 a mess and things quickly reached the point that I gave up even bothering with them, even though issues continued to crop up (case seperating, usb ports going nuts, drops in frame rate, weird buzzing noises). Then 13 month after my purchase (and the end of the warrenty) the dual 260's went south as did the battery. Dell's response was to offer to charge me $600 to look at the system and then charge me for repairs. I figured at that price I'd walk away and find a new laptop. Dell countered with what I thought to be a good deal on a brand new R2.

The first delivery date was Dec 14th. Then Jan 3. Then Jan 17th. Then Jan 20th. Which turned into sometime late Jan. Each time they called to tell me about the delay they kept trying to upsale me...got old fast and then when they offered to canceled the order they jerked me around some more, saying things like they couldn't, I'd have to return it, until finally I pointed out that their very own emails told me that the FTC required them to cancel the order because of the delays if I choose to.

The upshot is that while I loved my R1, I can't stand Dell anylonger.

I found the ASUS G73jW ROG-A1800 (complete with Dog Tag! Backpack! and Mouse!) on Amazon yesterday, ordered and poof it appeared on my door step an hour ago.

So far it looks promising. The keyboard is taking some getting used too, and I keep whacking the touchpad, but if that is the only complaint I ever develop about this system I'll be a happy man.

I do have some questions, and I hope someone can point me to a thread that has an over-view of this system and things I need to be aware of.

I went through and used CCleaner to remove the obvious "bloat", but if anyone has a list of things that should not be removed (on pain of blowing up your system) so I don't get overly aggressive with my removal I'd be grateful.

I'm also curious about the hybrid HDD's, and any tips and tricks you all might have about getting most out of these drives (given that hardware RAID isn't an option).

Thank You.

 

read this, it should help with the bloats, even if I would have done a clean install, and
about the HDD hybrids...well not sure if there is any tips...

 

Hybrid HDD are not bad but are far from SSD performance. Atm SSD are not cheap but you can get a somewhat decent SSD for 200$. I ordered an intel x25m 120g from neweggs(204$ shipping include), not the fastest in term of writing speed but reliable. The next SSD generation will probably be released soon, so prices will drop again.

 

Enjoy your laptop! I have this hybrid hard drive and just treat is as a normal drive... its just more reponsive... nothing much you can do.

Panther214

 

The Asus apps I kept on my system are the ATK Package, and Power4Gear Hybrid, plus drivers for hardware.

 

Thanks all. I spent most of yesterday cleaning off the last of the bloatware (plants vs zombies...seriously?) and the system seems to be running great. Did quite a bit of video editing in Premerie Elements 8, played some SCII and WOW without issue (though in WOW my frame rates did drop from 60 to 45 with everything maxed out...sad sad days...tragic I mean....) and the sound just blows me away.

 

Try plugging it in to your home entertainment system ala HDMI. Enjoy your surround

 

I'm not sure about the G73JW but the G73JH can do optical output through the headphone jack too. A lot of people don't realize that. You have to buy a cheap adapter to plug into the port that has toslink on the other side but I thought I would throw that out there. I didn't know about it until somebody here on the forums asked about the correct adapter to plug it in with. I bet the JW can do that too since they are nearly the same rig.

 

I think asus fastboot is a great program I would keep that.

 

Ah, see its possible that my laptop has the second best sound system in my house, and far better than my *ahem* entertainment system (the two speakers that are a part of my 720p flat screen I bought four years ago)...

I remember reading a thread about surround sound headphones around here someplace and started to look into it before I realized I was going to have a hard time justifying spending the money after blowing my bucks on the wife and kids for Christmas this year...maybe latter

 

Time for a dumb question.

How the frak do you get rid of Google Chrome on this system? I've tried using the administrators account, a local domain account, and my user account (which is in the local admin group) and using add/remove programs, CClean, or the uninstall from teh tool bar all of which do nothing.

Edit: I had to manually remove it via the registery and delete the files. As an aside, Google puts an amazing amount of stuff in the registery (over 200 entries).

 

I guess gathering information about you requires a lot of registry entries

 

Hey just because I"m paraniod doesn't mean Google isn't out to get me!

*glares at the VW bug with the mast that has been stalking me since I switched my default browser to bing on my iPhone*

 

Don't worry, that's just APPLE making sure you use their stuff in an approved manner.

 

Wait. Apple's out to get me know too?