G73SW Initial Setup and Questions

I just bought an Asus G73SW. Pretty bare-bones as far as software goes, but on the plus side it's fairly light on the crapware. Besides, it's really a much better machine than I expected to get for the budget I had, so I can't complain.

I'm trying to set it up to work decently well. Basically, I don't game all that much (although I'll get Diablo 3 on release day.) But I'd like to tweak it properly right now prior to transferring everything over from my previous machine.

And just to make it more fun, I'm new to Windows 7 as well - I ran my Lenovo R51 with XP up to now. I'm fairly confident I can figure everything out myself, but why go to the trouble when there's notebookreview?

I'd like to eke as much performance as possible out of the machine. I was trying to avoid making a clean install, but I'm willing to if necessary.

I'm also surprised about the partitions they made - four partitions, two of which are called SDATA1 and SDATA2 and one called DATA. Is there any particular reason to do it that way? (I have no knowledge about the various ways to set up hard drives - is that a RAID config or something I should be aware of?)

Finally, reading this forum, there seems to be a lot of issues with Asuses (Asii? ) having temp problems, BSODs, GSODs, flickering screens, etc. Should I be worried?

 

The best thing you can do is do a clean install of Windows, even if it had very little crapware. I didn't do it on mine and I wish I would have. As for the partitions on the hard drive, you can merge them if you don't want them and as far as I know there is no real reason to it. I left mine on my boot drive, but that's so I don't keep a lot of unnecessary files on my computer.

All computers have problems, but (knock on wood) I haven't had any yet. I've had mine for 8 months and its still running great. I think most of the problems with the systems have been resolved. I haven't see many issues with the Sandy Bridged models. I wouldn't worry, you have your warranty

 

The partition layout from the factory is arbitrary. Just don't wipe the recovery partition unless you back it up onto an external drive, or really don't want it. There is no raid support on the G73. For the clean install see: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...rivers-everything-you-need-fresh-install.html

Browse around the sticky. Pretty much everything from the G53 and G73 JW and SW models applies, the JH stuff won't apply to a SW.