G74 possible purchase

Hi everyone

New guy over here, looking at different powerful notebooks to replace his aging DELL XPS. The one that caught my attention the most is the ASUS G74SX-TZ064V which I would like to purchase. Posted this over at the ASUS forums as well and I'm looking to get more opinions before I make my purchase.

But before that, I have a couple of questions:

- it comes shipped with Windows 7 - I scoured the forums and it turns out there's a lot of problems with the explorer.exe and other bits, and since I am an avid Vista fan (yes, Windows Vista 64-bit worked flawless for me in the 4 years that I've used it), I was wondering if anyone has Vista experiences with the G74?

- random issues - I read about CPU throttling and stuttering when playing games, how easily can they be fixed if I experience the same? (bit of a stupid question I know, but I wanted to ask it)

- keyboard issues - I don't have a problems with the numpad or anything (I mainly play strategy and FIFA) but I've read comments with regards to the build aka the keys not responding properly?

- trackpad issues - carried over from G73?

- drivers - official drivers are sound or will I have to resort to Laptop 2 Go to get proper drivers for my NVidia card?

- weight/shape - almost 5kgs is a lot, but I was wondering whether it's relatively easy to carry due to the shape of the notebook

I'm really interested in the G74 and will probably buy it but I just want to know if the problems are easily avoidable/easily fixable.

Thanks guys

 

I'm thinking perhaps the 3D version will be better, worth the extra?

 

BIOS 202 remaps the numpad keys to something useful, no major complaints about the Sentelic touchpad other than some people not knowing how to adjust the Palm sensitivity, uses NVIDIA Verde release drivers, and CPU Throttle is addressed with ThrottleStop.