Question about some G53SW problems

Well I ordered a G53SW like in May or late April and I ended up having to get a new one from Newegg, then that new one had a power button problem and had to send it in to Asus, they sent it back with no fix, so AGAIN I had to send it in to a different service center, and this time it was fixed....so far.

I haven't had any power button problems, but the touchpad is very strange compared to previous gateways and dells I have had.
It isn't very smooth imo.
They actually replaced the touchpad during the RMA process, but it still feels strange.
Is it just as "different" for you guys?

The speakers on this thing are terrible. Is there any program or driver or something to improve the sound quality or give me more control over it?

The biggest issue is that the backlight of my LCD screen will not cycle using the keyboard buttons. I can change the keyboard backlight, etc, and I've reinstalled the ATK, P4G, and other things multiple times, but no change.
Uninstalling the ATK will bring back the brightness control, but then I obviously can't control anything else except that.
The brightness control works at the Logon screen, but once any user profile starts, it goes away.
Now the little animation thing of the brightness change does appear on screen, but the actual change won't occur until I unplug or plugin my power adaptor.
There is no option to change the LCD brightness through Windows and I can't figure out the problem, but it seems to be a software issue and not THAT important.

When I play Civ V, the game runs pretty slow compared to what I would have expected and it frequently just like flashes a black screen.
The graphics driver just completely died on me earlier, for the first time, which was very strange.
I'm using the 280.26 version of the drivers.

Any comments or help would be MUCH appreciated