Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
SO I was in the market for a powerful machine and quickly. I work in web technology for a large computer manufacturer. My true love is in art, specifically in multimedia and web design. I got an opportunity to design a website for a friends business. He was so pleased with the design that he (unexpectedly) got me 5 more clients who also wanted websites and in a hurry!
Most of my rigs in the past have been home built and powerful PCs. My notebooks have almost always been purely for work and were lightweight / slow. I knew that for this business I would need a much more powerful laptop and something that would impress clients. I also despise MACs! That pretty much left me with 2 choices after reading some Pro reviews. The Asus or an Alienware. With the lead time on the alienware clocking in at 30+ days in some cases I went with the Asus because they have them in stock at my local BB and folks on the web seem to like them.
I get home and fire up the new laptop, the video is doing odd things but I dismiss it at first. I get my adobe creative suite installed and it seems to be working ok. Occasionally large groups of pixels on the screen start getting stuck or flickering. OK well I need to see if this is a hardware issue or what. I installed a few video benchmarking utils. My scores were much lower than what others here have posted on their stock setups and my windows score was 2.9. This seemed odd to me. The benchmarks and Prime95 were not crashing the machine so I just went on with my day.
Then my buddy wants to play starcraft 2. That was a mess. If the game would launch I got frequent black screens, pauses, graphics glitches and crashes. I dont play games as much as I used to but I figured on an Asus kit and Bliz product I wouldn't have this many problems. I updated the video driver, which seemed to make things worse not better. (should have read these threads first!) Then I decided it was just too much of a hassle and I needed to be working anyway.
Photoshop and Premier were working ok but occasionally when I would drag my windows around I got alot of tearing and other strange graphics issues. Then the crashes started coming all the time. Machine Check Exceptions.
I tried setting the vid clock as suggested in a few threads here and got no better results. The crashes were more and more frequent and to the point where every 3 to 5 minutes it would crash. I decided to go back to the benchmarks and see what was going on. First run of Prime95 torture test locked the system up.
I called Asus tech support and this experience was horrible. I havent done tech support in 7 years and I still knew more than this guy. I had to explain what a BSOD was, walk him through looking up error codes etc. All he wanted to do was have me restore the laptop to original config, if that didnt work just send it back. This is troubleshooting and tech support? Horrible. He never offered to dig into the issue and I had to repeat myself over and over again to describe problems like "the machine is locking up" to which he replied "well type in your password". Trying to communicate with this guy in any kind of computer tech lingo was impossible. He was obviously new or just didnt care.
I had enough and returned the laptop to Best Buy. They have been awesome through the whole process I might add. They never give me any flack (probably because i got the black tie service) but hey im not complaining.
Number 2 -
Got home and fired it up. Appears to be doing much better than the other machine. First thing I did was run some benchmarks. I redo all my software installs and get back to working. Bam lockup! ! I restart and do some more work in photoshop browse the web and BAM! another lockup!
SO I dig some more in the forums and I read about all the preinstalled software issues. Ok this started to sound like some of the problems I was having. I decided to do the asus backup but first since I have a MSDN subscription I wanted to download a clean copy of Win7 just in case. When I went to burn the image all hell broke loose! Holy cow. The writer spun up and started working and then it was like a poltergeist was inside my G73. Screens start flickering, audio glitches the burn hangs and I cant kill the program no matter how hard I tried. Had to do a hard reboot and after that the machine was completely unstable. It was starting to perform like the first one only no graphics tearing.
SO I break out the dos testing tools and ran through a battery of testing. I tested the memory, proc drives etc. After hammering the crap out of them for hours I feel pretty comfortable that this time it is not a hardware issue.
Frustrated I just wiped the hard drive with a 0 writer and installed a clean win7 (by using my corp laptop burner!). I used one of the guides here to install only the most needed utilities from the asus site.
WOW what a difference. Everything loads faster, works great and runs smoothly!
Lesson here - get rid of everything that came from the factory and blow it all away. Install only the chipset, video, atk and realtech audio drivers.
I was able to upgrade my memory and hard drive configuration and remain stable.
I still cant run starcraft 2, but that's a problem for another day. Will keep this thread updated with more info as time goes on.
IN the future I will be breaking the laptop down and applying thermal compound properly, checking all of the connections and making my own improvements to the buildup.
Overall I cant say I am very impressed with Asus. They picked some nice hardware but their quality control and tech support is extremely poor.
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That was an impressively daunting story, but I am glad you managed to figure out what you needed to do, and didn't give up right away.
You deserve a cookie. -
mmm cookies r good! I have some cookie dough in the fridge thank you for reminding me! I think I will make some cookies and treat myself lol
Slipline's G73 Experience
Discussion in 'ASUS Gaming Notebook Forum' started by slipline, Aug 14, 2010.
