ASUS G73SW Owners' Lounge

The whole top panel is one piece (except the keyboard). There is a disassembly video on Youtube that shows in detail how to remove the keyboard and the panel (and the entire rest of the machine if you so desire). Just do a search on Youtube for "G73SW disassembly" and that should find it.

Have you tried just blowing the dust out with a can of air or the air blowing method/tool of your choosing? <----that was for rexrzer727.

 

I have not read through all 186 pages of this post, but I got my G73SW about 2 weeks ago and have been having an issue with HORRIBLE sound quality coming from the built in microphone. I am used to having decent quality, on my old HP people said they couldn't even tell I was using a laptop mic.

If you are having this issue I have found a solution, go into the microphone settings and turn the gain down to 0. For some reason when you install the Realtek driver it sets it to 24Db. Once I turned it down it started sounding great. I love my new laptop and now that I have this fixed and my SSD in it I have no issues at all!.

 

Skywise: Do you think you could post the directions for switching back to 2.09?

I think I may entertain the idea of switching from 2.11 to 2.09 on the Vertex 3. It's been working generally ok except for some glitches on boot up or shut down. On a few occasions, when I go to shut down it takes an abnormally long time to shut down. It's hung a couple times while shutting down as well. Now, it 'may' have eventually shut down on its own but after several minutes of waiting I shut it down by holding the power button. Also, on a few occasions, when I go to start up it will hang before arriving at the logon screen. I had the 'no gui' boot option in config.sys checked so I wouldn't see the animation at start up. On a couple of boots I got just a couple lines of colored pixels at the very top of the screen. But on a couple of occasions it did finally reach the log in screen but took a long time. I disabled the 'no gui' boot and still had a couple hangs at boot or times that it took a long long time to get to the log in screen.

Do you think switching to 2.09 would be worth a try given the issues I've been having? I would really like this drive to work but I don't intend to spend a whole lot of time on it. I may give 2.09 a try but if that doesn't work I'll be sending the drive back.

 

Since your problem only happens during shutdown or startup, I'd say it's more likely a Windows problem. Something is wrong with your install, either an application, service or driver - try boot logging to see if the log contains any information that might be of use, and go through all the drivers and see if there are any updates. You might also have to revert to the default drivers that Asus deliver with the laptop from the factory. Also check the event viewer in Windows to see if the cause is listed there.

If it's a drive issue, you'll experience it during normal use, most often in the form of the mouse working, but the OS being unresponsive. It'll either fix itself after a while, or go into a BSOD after that. With that said, here are the instructions:

Bootable Tools for OCZ Vertex2/3, Agility2/3, Solid3, Revo, and Ibis SSD's

Post #1 tells you how to make the USB boot drive, #5 how to edit the configuration so it flashes 2.09.

 

Thank you very much. I had the same problem.

 

Thanks for the suggestion that it probably wasn't the drive. I thought the same thing, that if it were the drive other things would happen while using the computer and not just at startup and shut down. Yet, it seemed the drive was the common denominator and I guess I was just looking for it to malfunction because of the circumstances.

At your suggestion, I enabled boot logging. It pointed to a file related to a wireless laser printer I had just recently installed (yes, the light bulb went on..just recently). I thought about it and I believe the problems didn't start until after the printer was installed. The printer itself has been a bit of a pain but I won't go into that here. So, it made sense that the printer could be the culprit. I went online and researched the file that didn't load properly and found out sure enough, it was related to my printer. The suggestion online was to edit the registry key so that particular file wouldn't load. I did this and thought I had the problem taken care after several shut downs and reboots (3-4) cycled clean and fast. But, on the next boot it hung for longer than usual and then finally came up to the logon screen. The log pointed again to another file related to the printer. I decided to just 86 the printer all together and see if that helped. It did. I'm on about 6-7 reboots and no signs of any trouble. The computer shuts down within a few seconds and cold boots in about 18 seconds according to BootRacer which I believe starts timing after POST. I'll work on reinstalling the printer tomorrow and see if the problem returns and go from there. Time will tell if the problem was completely 100% the somewhat FUBAR'd printer install. It will take a few more start up shut down cycles before I'm convinced. Thanks again for your help.

 

Printers are evil - they cost you a lot of money in use, break down when you least need them to and are the cause of more support calls than any other piece of IT hardware. Glad you got things fixed.

 

Hi guys, another question/situation where I'm wondering what's happening. I was playing Crysis 2 the other day with all settings on maximum. During part of the early part of the single player campaign and in one of the cut scenes the audio appears to stutter but as far as I can tell, the video is ok. I thought that was very odd (especially with the cut scene). I would expect the video to stutter or both video and audio but not just audio. I've read a little bit about throttling issues going on. Could/would this be part of that? Or, does the cpu throttling only cause video to stutter? Is there something I can run that will monitor the system and show whether the throttling phenomena is happening during those points in the game? Thanks for any info.

 

I use RealTemp you can find it here:

Real Temp - New temp program for Intel Core processors
or here
Real Temp - CPU temperature monitoring

Just run it and later on you can check the log file which shows you all the temps and CSpeed.

 

Soul - why don't you just try Throttlestop? If you're not using it, you're getting throttled regardless, and that can have numerous negative effects, including audio stuttering.

 

I might give Throttlestop a try and see if it helps. I just hadn't read up on Throttlestop enough to really know what its good and bad points were. I thought I had read somewhere that running Throttlestop was potentially bad since you were essentially defeating some of the failsafes built into the system. Then again, I currently don't do a ton of nonstop gaming or anything that would tax the system that hard for extreme periods of time.

 

Hi everyone,

I've lurked around these forums for a month or two now as I was trying to decide what laptop to buy. I ended up getting an open box g73sw-xn2 for $900 bucks because it was such a steal, and it's been treating me pretty well. However I've been playing The Witcher 2 and my framerates aren't as nice as I would like them to be, so I started looking into overclocking.

I downloaded Furmark to try and get a baseline of what my temperatures are like without any overclock, and it maxed out at 90 degrees C after like 15 minutes, and hovered at around 88-89C for 5 more minutes after that until I shut off Furmark. These temps seem a bit high to me, so I haven't tried any overclocking so far.

Should I be concerned? I don't have central air and live in Florida so i'm sure ambient temperatures aren't helping me. Does this look like it warrants a repaste with IC Diamond instead of whatever is stock and/or a cooling pad?\

Help/opinions would be much appreciated.

 

There is a HP HDD Caddy that works with the G73, anyone remember what one?

The G73 Caddys are so damn expensive

EDIT: The HP ZD7000 caddy is the one that works

 

Thanks pall you saved my few hours with this!! I was gonna wipe my system again
Again thanks a looot bro!!

 

hi everyone, i have some question about Asus G73sw-XT1 (from Tigerdirect $1200 )

i have been reading many pages but i still not sure about it,
i don't have the laptop so i can't use the GIGABYTE 6 Series SATA Check Application to check it, does ASUS G73SW-XT1 support SATA III ?
because i'm thinking to get OCZ SLD3-25SAT3-120G

 

I'm trying to pick between a 128GB Crucial M4 and a 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 at the moment and there have been some wild price fluctuations on OCZ drives on Newegg, as in changing by $20 or more almost every other day. Weird stuff, almost made me just go straight for the M4, but now they're both around $200 again . . .

 

I believe it does, but can anyone confirm?

 

i recently got a G73sw gaming series laptop and it came like 2 days ago
my laptop keeps shutting down when im playing high quality games like sc2.
anyone know why?? the highest temp it goes to is 68C so i dont think its overheating...

 

actually i found out my fans arent working at all
is there any way to fix it?

 

Are you sure? You feel and hear absolutely nothing from the fans (put your ear up to it, because theyre very quiet and you cant normally hear them) ?

If so, you'll need to RMA it to Asus or return it.

Try HWInfo32, start in sensor only mode, and see what it says about your Fan RPM speeds

 

Throttlestop does nothing except temporarily fix a BIOS bug.

 

I own a G72GX-RBBX05 and am looking to upgrade to the G73SW-XT1 from TigerDirect. Can anyone tell me why the G73 on TigerDirect is cheaper than other G73s? Also, how much of an upgrade would it be from my current G72? Thanks.

 

hello guys, i would appreciate your help, my g73 is not showing anything on the screen when i turn it on, however the indicators (power, hdd, wifi) turn on, i tried to hook it up to a tv via hdmi to know if it is a problem with the laptop screen itself or an internal problem, however it says no signal, i am doing this from startup is there a way to make the asus show the post on the tv. thanx in advance.

 

Can anyone confirm the G73SW has SATA III (6.0 Gbps) ?

Looks completely fine to me. The G73 is cheap because the G74 is now released.

I have the XA1, which is basically the same, just a different HDD AFAIK. Different models will be cheaper than others for small little changes like that, and TigerDirect has good prices usually to begin with.

It would be a nice upgrade! But with the new G74 out, unless it's a price issue, why not get that for the slight performance increase?

Plug it into the TV with HDMI, and wait to make sure its booted up. And then press Fn+ F8 , which will change the screen input from the laptop LCD to HDMI, etc. And make sure you try all your TV input options.

If nothing comes up, its your graphics card. If it does show up, then its your screen.

 

thanks [>>ahl395<<]

 

I'm not sure about other configurations but comparing the G73SW-XT1 and the G73SW-A1 the only difference appears to be the hard drive. While the XT1 has 1 500GB hard drive, the G73SW-A1 has (2) 7200rpm Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid Drives. If the specs listed are correct, everything else appears to be the same as far as I can tell.

 

Thanks for the replies. If the only difference is the hard drive I think it's worth it (I have a spare 500 GB I can use in the second bay). How much of a performance increase would the 560m be over the 460m? Is that the only thing the G74 has over the G73?

 

Yes thats the only thing really. It has more memory that comes standard, though you wont see any difference. And a slightly different keyboard layout many people like better.
The cooling system is a little different, although the G73's is actually better IIRC.

The 560M is only a bit better. And its essentially just a 460M that's overclocked. So you could get your 460M, Easily overclock it to the same speeds as the 560M (775/1550/1250) and match its performance. Or OC higher to beat it.

The catch is that you can arguably OC the 560M in the G74, and therefor easily beat the overclocked 460M too

 

But the 460m has 1.5 GB vram vs the 3 GB of the 560m. Wouldn't that make a difference?

 

found the prof for G73SW-XT1 on SATA III
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...asus-g73sw-owners-lounge-175.html#post7765125

yeah, i like G74 Cooling
just because of the price issue so i go for G73

 

Windows Explorer APPCRASH event looping suddenly started happening, just a heads up to everyone..
Logs indicated somekind of issue with ASUSWSShellExt64.DLL
Uninstalling ASUS WebStorage application seems to have resolved the problem; however, needed to reinstall ATKPackage manually for some reason.
(keyboard hotkeys and backlight stopped functioning). I'm running a G73SW-A1 Win7x64 Home.

 

No. There isn't a game or normal application out there that will use more than the 1.5 GB video ram of the 460M with the resolutions we use. You would need extremely high resolutions and/or SLI for it to make a difference.

 

I found a good deal on a 128GB Crucial M4 and I will be using it as my OS drive soon. I was just wondering if I should plug it into my second HDD slot and update the firmware before installing the OS, or update it after the OS install. I welcome any other SSD clean install tips as well.

 

Nope. As said above

Thanks!

 

In theory it shouldn't make a difference, but I'd do the firmware upgrade first in case something goes wrong with it. It would then save you the pain of having to do an RMA after having spent a lot of time installing software and moving over files.

 

When I do a clean install on my SSD (as well as a backup clean install on my HDD to use if the SSD ever gives me trouble), I'd like to avoid the 100MB system reserved partition which is usually created. Does anyone see any harm in using the tricks listed in this link to avoid the partition?

Hack to Remove 100 MB System Reserved Partition When Installing Windows 7 My Digital Life

 

Its only 100MB, who cares?

But as long as you dont use BitLocker encryption or Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), I dont see why it would harm you at all.

 

Finished installing and setting up my Crucial M4. It is running beautifully! I just have one question about an issue I ignored with my last clean install that has appeared again. My computer keeps telling me it has failed to install a USB2.0-CRW driver. Does anyone know why this is happening? My USB 2.0 ports are working just fine is it worth trying to find this driver?

And iTunes still takes 10 seconds or more to open, guess my SSD can't fix crappy software. But everything else is great!

 

Can it be the card reader?

 

Crysis 2 in Ultra settings uses all of the 460 memory. So far that's the only game I know that does.

http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/11/09/09/ehz.png

 

Crysis (both 1 an 2) are broken though. The system requirements are simply not realistic and indicates the engine hasn't been properly optimized.

 

I noticed that a GPU repaste on an SW seems to be a rarity in comparison to the number of JH repastes. Can any SW owners who have attempted a GPU repaste report on the their success? I'm getting sick of Furmark temps in the low-mid 90's and game temperatures in the upper-mid 80's (darn you, Far Cry 2) and I'm considering attempting a repaste while I still have the time (last week before college).

Also, I bought an anti-static wrist strap just to make sure I don't screw anything up that way, but where would I connect it, since the G73 has a predominantly plastic case?

 

Cool beans, I was getting a little worried about the upcoming MW3, BF3 releases using all of everything the 460m has to offer lol.

 

Wow, repaste was definitely a success, Furmark max temp after 15 minutes is now 81C, thank goodness!
Now to see if it stays this way, although it should technically get even better after the curing time is done.

Edit: Repaste+Antec Cooler Mini, and 10 minutes of Furmark leaves me at a steady 76C!



However, I did not repaste the VRAM, and instead left on the stock paste. Really kicking myself for that choice now. Nothing seems to be wrong and I don't really want to go through the whole process again right now, but I don't want to live in fear of my VRAM burning itself out because I screwed up the paste and didn't put on something fresh when I took off my heatsink . . .

 

Now you just need to pump it up in Afterburner

 

I have an ASUS G73SW-BST6

I live in Brasil... so I have a MUCH BIGGER problem.... the warranty is valid only there in USA...

I opened my laptop, REPASTED, with Arctic Silver 5, did ALL things correctly, JUST TO FIND OUT THAT ----->>> THE GPU FAN WAS BLOCKED!!!!!!

acctually, I have the notebook for 3 months... and it was working FINE before... I used to play for hours, and a couple of times I checked the temperature, and it was FINE... like, 10 HOURS PLAYING it wouldn't go over 67, 70º C.....

NOW, all of a sudden, IT's GETTING 90 with 10 minutes playing... THE FAN SIMPLY STOPPED WORKING!!! WHY???? its NOT DUST, IM SURE! VERY SURE!...


NOW, here in BRASIL there ISN'T, simply, ISN'T anything that FITS this motherboard... NO COOLER FAN is compatible...

I think i'm gonna have to BUY a fan FROM USA... wait for like MONTHS...

very, VERY disappointing..

 

To be honest, if I had temps like yours to start with, I never would have repasted. I only did it because I was nearing 90 under normal gaming stress and passing 90 in Furmark.

You're sure that the fan is completely plugged back in? There's a lot of tape around that cable that could easily get in the way when you reattached it. Have you tried disassembling and reassembling again just to make sure everything is connected right?

 

sorry, I didn't explain me too well...

I thought that the problem causing the overheating was the thermal paste... only after I repasted that I realised that the blocked cooler was the problem!

Asus G73sw is SO COOL that even with the cooler blocked I am beeing able to use it normally ( with no gammimg )... It's just getting hot after 20, 30 minutes of playing..

So, now, I think maybe if the cooler wasn't broken, and the problem was the motherboard, I managed to completly broken the cooler, cause I opened it... and tried to clean it's inside chips...

so... Now i'm gonna test the motherboard, turning it on, with the CPU cooler in GPU's place, for just 1 second, just to see if it will spin...

If it spin, I'll order from eBay, USA, another cooler... and finally, after 1, or 2 months, I'll fix this... I think...

thanks

 

Random question. I've read that Ivy Bridge processors will be compatible with Sandy Bridge motherboards, so does that mean that it would be possible to throw an Ivy Bridge into my G73 if I ever feel so inclined?

Secondly, does anyone know the feasibility of using an eGPU as detailed in the thread I will link in order to boost the capabilities of my G73?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/418851-diy-egpu-experiences.html

Alas, my 460M is already feeling a little underpowered, but I'm not going to be in the position to buy a new laptop for at least a few years now (darn college fees). It's really too bad the Asus proprietary format makes a GPU upgrade impossible, and this seems to be the only option to improve my graphic performance.

 

hyrule, good question. The answer is that right now no one knows for sure, since the CPUs aren't out yet. At the very least you might need a BIOS update to recognize the new CPUs, and I don't really see Asus providing that.

As for the external GPU question, I don't think it's worth it. Your only option is to use mPCI, which means you lose the wifi card, and the available bandwidth is far less than the 460m already has. Getting a beefier GPU isn't going to help much if you can't feed it the data it requires. The main advantage as I see it is GPGPU and multiple monitors. For the latter I would look into USB3 solutions instead.

(PS. you can overclock your GPU so it's not as bad)