New G73- How'd I do?

Well, the title says it all. A while ago, I had a Dell XPS M1730 and loved it. However, fears over the meltdown-prone GPUs and financial needs made me put it up for sale. I've been thinking about another gaming rig(or modding up my T500 with a Vidock). A friend of a friend needed to get rid of his G73 and I snatched it up for $850.

I have to admit I didn't even think I could touch an older gaming notebook for that kind of price, let alone a previous-gen piece of hardware with a Core i7 Quad and a GPU that equals or betters that of my old XPS.

As a mini-review, the build quality seems great for a consumer-line notebook(I'm admittedly used to my ThinkPads). The only downside is the touchpad; it seems extremely quirky and the buttons are quite honestly the worst I've ever seen on any notebook. However, I strongly dislike touchpads so I will very likely be using my external mouse. Other than that I like the no-nonsense black design; it doesn't have all the glitzy lights nor stands out as a possible theft magnet. The keyboard is alright; I'll have to get used to the spacing and chiclet design, but I'm sure I'll manage.

Performance so far seems to be awesome(I'm reimaging the notebook right now). The seller demonstrated SC2 to me when it was running on battery, and even though the CPU/GPU were likely clocked down it looked amazing and ran smoothly. I'm sure I'll be very pleased with the performance.

Some questions, though:

Firstly, I'm assuming there are FHD screens available. Are there particular manufacturers/types I'd want to avoid? I'd prefer to have better screen real estate as I will be using this rig for more than just gaming.

Where can I find a second HDD caddy? Also, would I be able to keep the recovery partition by cloning the drive whenever I upgrading(considering two 7200RPM, 750GB drives a litle later on).

I'm also a storage nut. The more space, the better. Has anyone removed the optical drive and replaced with a third HDD caddy? A 1TB drive in the optical drive bay would be a very nice addition.

Are there any online hardware manuals available? The seller smoked and the laptop sells pretty strongly of cigs. I'd like to give the notebook a cleaning on down the line, and also start bumping up the RAM(four slots is a theoretical max of 16GB on this rig, right?).

Sorry for the onslaught of questions. I'm pretty excited to be in the performance notebook segment again.

 

Optical Drive Bay caddy: 2nd HDD / SSD Caddy for ASUS G51Jx, G73Jh, G73sw, K52JR [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Second hard drive caddy: Hard Drive Caddy

I believe this is the correct screen: Amazon.com: ASUS G73JH LAPTOP LCD SCREEN 17.3" Full-HD LED DIODE (SUBSTITUTE REPLACEMENT LCD SCREEN ONLY. NOT A LAPTOP ): Electronics

The user manual is available as a PDF in the download section of the Asus support site for the G73.

Note: I haven't upgraded my screen. I am pretty sure that's the right one. Send a PM to JohnnyFrost if you like. He just upgraded his screen and would have the exact part number. I do have that exact hard drive caddy but I bought it from asusparts.eu overseas for a stupid amount of money before they started stocking them in the USA. And finally, I saw that optical drive caddy one time and bookmarked it but I never purchased it. I saw a link to those in the Alienware forums one time.

 

Any other place for the Optical Drive caddy? Seems way too overpriced for a caddy...

 

yeah 23 bucks for a hdd caddy is way to overpriced but its from the asus site and the quality is imacculate. but im sure if you just looked around on the web some you could find one for under 10

 

I'm talking about the optical drive caddy linked above, which is like $45 bucks. I'm thinking of getting rid of my Blu-ray drive for a nice $80-100 profit as I never use disks anymore.

 

Thankfuly my rig came with a DVD/RW drive, but as I don't need an optical drive and love storage space, I think a 12.5mm 1TB drive would just be wonderful to have. Pair that with two 750GB, 7200RPM drives... yeah. 2.5TB of storage space would be more than welcome.