ASUS N71JQ Owners Lounge

Hey guys, i just installed Windows 8 onto my N71JQ, and i used the driver CD to install the drivers which in turn I had to change the compatibility to Windows 7, but I've noticed that i cannot seem to use the top hotkeys for mute, volume up/down etc.

And there are no Windows 8 drivers for this laptop at all..

Ideas? I don't even know if all the other drivers installed properly either lol which i think they probably did not!

So I'm coming to see what others have done with their laptop running Win8?

 

I'm debating whether to update the laptop to Win8 as well, esp before the end of the month to take advantage of the $40 upgrade price. However, seems there may be a driver issue. Have a look on this thread, may be some more information about drivers:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-reviews-owners-lounges/494250-asus-n61jq-driver-thread-21.html

 

Worked it for a couple more weeks. Seemed stable. Was watching some streaming video and FREEZE, BSOD. So no, video driver update wasn't it. So I'm back to thermal issues I think. Will just wait until the warranty to run out in June and fix it myself. Thinking that a good cleaning and replacement of thermal paste with Arctic Silver will do the trick.

 

Please, update the thread after you do this, I really interested whether this helps (especially if you change your mind and do this earlier).
My sad story looks like this:
I used to have something like that for around 1 month 1.5 years ago (or 2.5), then symptompts suddently disappeared (I think that it was after I uninstalled preinstalled trial version of microtrend internet security, but that can be just coincidence) and it worked fine without problems for a while. And now I have freezing problems again, looks like it appears mostly when I use internet, mostly in browsers (but doesn't depend on browser) or during skype call. It doesn't look like heating issue neither (I tried controlling temperature with different programs and it can easily freeze at 75-80 degrees, and heavy programs like virtual pc or some games can work without problems for long-long time), but I can believe in anything that would explain those freezes even tried recovery disks which reduced amout of freezes from 5 per day to 0-1 per day but they still happen. I actually don't know what to do, maybe disassemble it for cleaning, maybe it is some software problem, or will try your idea with thermal paste, for example with antivirus scanning internet traffic, I just don't know what to do with this, probably I'll try different antivirus to check this version and they try to disassemble it to see how it looks inside...
Had to tell this someone, because it is really annoying, thanks for listening

 

Hello,

I was able to install the 2nd hard drive connector, in my ASUS N71JQ-X1 it appears to be working! in this configuration:

Primary Drive: 120GB SSD
Secondary Drive: 500GB HSGT 7200RPM

I tried to add a second 120GB SSD to the Secondary drive however the BIOS would not recongize the second bay when an SSD was present. it works just fine with a regualar sata drive.


Also - has anyone confirmed can this system run 16GB of ram? I read though the thread and I saw a few people ask however it looked like no-one confirmed.

 

Hey N71 owners,

I seem to foolishly fed my laptop -19 V instead of +19V with help of a friendly universal power supply, and now it's not charging anymore and only getting power from the battery. I'm thinking of buying a motherboard from ebay soon, but maybe some one you has better ideas (or possibly willing to swop or sell for a soft price? )

Thanks!

 

I recall in a previous thread that someone tried 8Gb and the system only reported seeing 6 or 7Gb.

 

It will be a while before I violate the warranty, probably June or July of this year. I may have another look inside, this time removing the fan shroud and checking out the graphics card. I think that is where the trouble is because there just aren't any confirming messages in Windows Event Viewer or using the program Who Crashed to read the minidump if it blue screens. Usually the system just freezes and I have to force a power off. I can leave it on all day and do moderate tasks like viewing short video streams without any problem. When I fire up my PowerDVD 11 to view DVD or Blue-Ray media I can get about 12-15 minutes of play before a freeze. I monitor temps with HWMonitor and the video card will get up into the lower 70's C and stabilize, but then wink out eventually. I supposed it could be a host of other suspects, audio drivers, Windows 7 glitch, you name it. Really hard to figure this one out with no definite crash report. I'll keep playing with stuff and report progress.

 

no no, 8 GB works fine. i don,t know about 16 though.

 

Hello there i registered here i read some of the topics and it seems to me this is the right place to ask my question...here it goes.
I have an Asus N71 JQ i really like this laptop it's not the cream of the crop but it will serve me for long time to come, in fact i have 2 issues that i hope people in here can help me with.

1- When im playing some games after some time my pc starts to "crash" freeze in random ocasions...and honestly i cant find a way to resolve this problem the main reason being that i dont understand much about computer software and hardware and i prefer to let things the way they are than to ruin my pc.

2- I know that this pc has a turbo boost but i haven't it installed...it seems a usefull application because it appears that turbo boost overclocks the n71 to 2.8ghz and in my opinion seems usefull for games and other stuff.

Well those are my 2 ssues with my laptop i really need help and if someone could help words may seem not sufficient but i would be very thnkfull to anone that helped me (by the way if the solution to those issues is by downloading something could you post the links for direct and free download =) ? )

Thank you all in advance

 

If this happens in games only, then most likely happens because of overheating. And most likely this happened because of the dust somewhere inside your laptop. You have actually several options to try to resolve this
1) disassemble it and clean up its insides (and some people also replaced thermal paste of their CPU), that should be the most effective one, but it requires some skills and being really carefull with it in order not to damage anything
2) try to use vacuum cleaner to suck out some dust from it (in the spot where hot air goes out of it). It may give you good results, but may not, guess you may try to do it, nothing difficult at all, it helped me at least once
3) buy some cooling pad for it, it is not real solution, but it will give you a little bit more time inside your game, but maybe not that much as you wish

It is not an application, you don't have to install anything, this technology is inside processor and it just works that's all, more info can be found in wikipedia Intel Turbo Boost - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
or just google for turbo boost

 

Hi

Does anyone know if this model supports 4 GB DDR3 RAM modules @1600 MHz?
I know it should theoretically work with any DDR3 frequency, but I want to make sure.

 

Hello everybody!

I have a great problem with my N71jq-TY034. I have no sound from built-in speakers, headphones or anything else. My system can not find audio device, exept ATI High Defenition Audio Device(HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_1002&DEV_AA01&SUBSYS_00AA0100). I've to change motherboard(in warranty service) because of a bit of coffee on left side of laptop near LAN and Charger ports. After about a half year i restarted Windows and find out that there is no audio device(don't do anything with it before). After this i changed my motherboard on previous(service give me this Motherboard after repair, and it's working) but still no sound. Also i have only 1 USB port working on left side, which one is nearer to LAN port. And now there is no warranty on my laptop. PLEASE, i beg you help me to find out what is going on with it!!! I've installed Win7 x86 Ultimate, Win7 x86 Home Premium. Drivers from official ASUS drivers bank(because i don't remember where is my drivers CD, if anybody have it please share with me, i will be very happy) Waiting for reply, thanks everybody who can\will help me!!!!

P.S. Sorry for my English I'm russian, and don't know it as good as you.

 

Not a lot of help available for the problems you are having. Sounds like your motherboard isn't quite up to spec. You might peck around a bit and see how things look in device manager. Your USB ports might be set to turn off to save power. I don't know if the audio is a separate card or motherboard resource. With questionable motherboard it could be related to your other problems. There is a restore available from the hidden partition, called partition recovery. You get to it by F9 on startup. I would remove all of your important files and programs first as this is essentially a factory restore. I haven't used it yet myself, but I suppose it will wipe any driver update you might have done too. If that doesn't fix your problems, then I would suspect hardware (motherboard).

 

Hi everyone,

So Ive had this laptop for two years and half and it worked fine for about a year and then i started getting a lot of lag / framerate drop when I was playing, I basically had to alt tab back to the desktop and wait for it to cool down....
I then stopped playing on my laptop and was getting good performance, but then recently it started happening a lot again.. for example as soon as I try to watch a flash video online or youtube ... I get a laggy computer and I have to restart to make it work again for another 30 mins...until it happens again

I regularly clean the fan/ fan exhaust/ keyboard (everywhere that gets dust). However I have noticed the bios is version 204 (the current most updated one on their website is 208) . Could it help performance to update it? i'm a bit worried I might brick the computer??

Thanks for your help!

 

I bricked mine trying to do the BIOS flash. It was two weeks old at the time. There are several posts in this thread about the process. I won't go into it here since I'm not sure I can remember it correctly myself and it seems so easy to screw up. It's an RMA back to ASUS for a new motherboard if you don't do it right. The 208 update fixed, among other things, the exhaust fan operation. Quieted it down some. Mine has also developed heat-related issues when watching DVD/Blu-Ray or streaming video. It will freeze and require a forced power-down, and reports nothing to Windows making it hard to trace what went wrong. I use a hardware monitor, CPUID, which displays temps and voltages. The Radeon HD 5730 video card temp will climb steadily into the upper 70C's after about 20 minutes of video and then it might freeze. Not all the time though which is strange and makes me think there might be other problems. There are earlier threads in this forum discussing how some have remedied heat problems by replacing the heatsink compound. This will void the warranty however. I am considering this but will wait until my warranty expires this June.

 

Hello there.
So I'm about to open my computer for a fourth time to clean it out and re-apply thermal paste etc. but the problem is a couple of my screws are near-stripped, and if I take them out again I will not be able to put them back in.
I need to know what size the screws are in order to be able to replace them. Attempting to contact ASUS support only got me a "send it in so we can do it for you, we will not provide you with any information at all whatsoever" response from them. Any help would be appreciated!

 

Is it possible to upgrade screen from 1600x900 to full hd. I really do not know is it JQ JA or JK version and is it important...
Thanks, i really need this info...

 

Hi everyone. First post, but I hope you can help. Can you tell me the difference between the N71JA and N71JQ?

My wife had an N71JA, (motherboard rev 2.1, BIOS 206). It died recently, and I replaced it with a refurbished motherboard (rev 2.1). I received the new board, installed and it boots up fine (with the exception of the Win7 Authentication check :\). She is running Windows 7-64bit, i7 CPUP.
BUT - I find out that the board has BIOS for N71JQ, 202 (oldest version). Of course the checksums in the Asus BIOS update utilities (Winflash, EZ-Flash) do not allow me to rewrite the BIOS due to the dissimilar Motherboard model numbers.

So I am left with the following:
1-Leave it as is? (if it's working don't try to fix. It's only been a day so far but it seems to be working). I don't know the detailed differences between the N71JA and N71JQ, so don't know if it makes a difference.
2-Find a way to force the BIOS to update to the correct motherboard version?

Suggestions?

 

HOW do people manage to do this? The only way I can imagine is to start the process, note the DO NOT INTERRUPT warning - but break out of it just from pure devilment, to see what would happen!

 

Just bought myself an asus i7-q740 that was sold to me when I responded to an advertisement about a i7-2630qm (obviously a better cpu) He said sorry about listing the wrong cpu but assured me that it was "basicly the same thing" and that I could "upgrade the cpu to that one later since its the same socket"

More or less I could tell the guy was trying to rip me off, but when he was asking 500 for the laptop with the 2630qm and I offered him 350 for it with the q740, so I don't feel that bad about the exchange.

However... with the q740 in it, this thing is totally useless to me, since I have a sony vaio with a q740 in it and a better video card, that is already loaded with all of my programs ect.

My question is, can I really upgrade to the i7-2630qm? Or can I upgrade to something around this, or better then this? Does someone have a cpu compatbility list or know of the top two cpus that could go into this board? I assume and hope that the q740 isnt anywhere near the max of what could be in here.

~~~~~Edit~~~~~
Still would like to find a list of compatible cpus, since G1 or PGA988 socket only tells me that it would fit in there, not if it would work well or be able to fully use the cpu.

The cpu I'm looking at now is the i7-2670qm its a PGA988/g1 socket and scores a benchmark of 6110 verse the Q 740 with a benchmark of 3249. I see them online between 150-200 dollars, so if this cpu is compatible, this seems like a great upgrade for me, since I'm mainly after raw cpu power.

Also wondering if socket rPGA988B would work? or is g2 noncompatible with g1? The cpu I'm looking at is i7-3740QM with a benchmark of 8582.

 

Actually, it is pretty easy. I think I documented the problem previously in this thread, along with a couple other users that did more or less the same thing. I don't recall exactly what happened but there can be confusion when working in the BIOS flash program as to where the update is located. No confirmation prompts, such as the time honored ARE YOU SURE. It was just blink and dead. Made me feel pretty stupid.

 

UPDATE: It has been a couple of months and I'm out of the warranty period now. I have been in contact with ASUS concerning the freezes and their first suggestion was to do a system restore. It took a couple of days to yank everything off my drives but the restore went smoothly and, sure enough, no more freezes! Back to being a happy N71 owner.

 

Awww I'm done...

My n71jq is dying and needs some fast help After playing some demanding games its just freeze and nothing can be done about it - just hard reset by power button. It's damn annoying, I tried formatting whole partitions with fresh Windows installation - didn't help. I tried to disassembly my laptop, cleaned the fan a bit - didn't help. Finally I update bios to 208 - didn't help, but the fan's work seems to be nice now. What more can be done about it? I even got Zalman's cooler pad...

Btw - do someone have a picture of key mounting? Can't make these white thingies under place properly

 

Pretty quiet in the N71 thread these days. I'm not sure what I can do to help, but I fixed my freeze problem by doing a system restore from the hidden partition. If you have wiped your drives you may have wiped this partition also. Maybe not. Boot up the system holding the F9 key and see if it offers you a Restore. The factory restore worked for my problem and it is about the only thing I can recommend. There are some ASUS specific drivers in the install that should be updated after your system is functioning correctly. And of course the whole host of Microsoft updates to go through. Good luck.

 

Ok, so i haven't had a problem with this laptop for a very long period. Now, the time has come for something to go wrong . Today I unplugged the ethernet cable to plug it in another computer. After I finished with the other computer I plugged it back in the N71JQ. Nothing happened, as if no cable was present. I troubleshot the problem, still no result. Entered device manager to disable and enable the atheros lan adapter but it froze when i clicked disable. Forced closed the window and tried again with the same result. Finally I decide to reboot the machine and got the "PXE-E01 pci vendor and device ids do not match". Now, device manager doesn't detect any ethernet adapter. Wireless works fine. I googled the error message and got some hints like this link: PXE-E01: PCI Vendor and Device IDs do not match - problem - HP Support Forum - 124900 but I didn't try anything yet because i wanted to post the problem here first. So, what do you guys think? Is the adapter fried, BIOS problem, or something else?

 

I feel like I'm the only N71 user left in this thread. I usually check the forum every week or two. Thought I would wait this post out, see if there was someone that could truly help. No takers. Well, I just tested my Ethernet port the other day and it works just fine. The last time I really used it daily was for 6 months from August 2010-February 2011 and I never had a problem. It could be hardware, cold solder joint on the board or something broke in the socket. It could be operating system. When was the last time you restored your Windows 7 operating system? That tends to fix all sorts of problems. Beyond that, I'm not much help.

 

I feel like this will be a waste of my time, but I'll give it a try anyhow. My "Boomerang" kid just returned back home to live with mom and dad after being out after school for a couple of years. He returned with the laptop that I bought for him while he was at school. It has the DC power port broken like many of the others that I have read about. If I take out the battery, plug in the DC power jack, and press it down and to the rear - the system will power up! I would like to try and repair this problem myself, but I would like to first get a copy of that service manual that was available a few years back. Both of the links that I have previously discovered here are no longer valid. I was hoping that someone who has a copy of that pdf file could private message me with a way that I can obtain that info. I have repaired other laptops from different manufacturers before, but knowing the proper sequence of dis-assembly can be invaluable. I did view the You-tube video on the SATA connector, but would prefer to have the manual, if at all possible. Thanks in advance for anyone's help!

 

I have that. It is identified N71VN Series Chapter 02-v1.0.pdf and has the color pictures throughout. I might have my email address in my profile page. I'll check. Otherwise, how do you do a PM? MB

 

Are there any new informations on the cause of the freezing of the N71JQ series?

I have these problem now about a year. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Also with a new SSD and complete clean system. Reinstalled win7 and all drivers from the asus website. The System worked without any problems for 4 weeks and then started again to freeze.

Sometimes the notebook runs a day without freezes and on another day 5 freezes in a hour... it really pissed me off :/

Has anyone a solution for this or talked to an asus technician?

 

I have posted a thread concerning system freezes with the steps I took toward resolution. The laptop was still under warranty at the time, so I was working toward an RMA if I couldn't fix it. Tech support suggested I restore the OS, which I did. When I tested the system afterward the problem appeared to be gone. My test was to play a DVD movie. Prior to the system refresh I could only get maybe 10 minutes of video and it would freeze up. Not quite a BSOD but screen would blank with some persistent audio noise until I held the power button to force shutdown. System would boot back up just fine and report no Windows crash or other problems. I have been using some free utilities to maybe help figure out what is wrong. A program called Who Crashed which might be able to suggest some alternatives to an OS problem. Also a program called CPUID Hardware Monitor which I used to monitor temperatures of various components. After several months of crash-free operation, it has happened again. It might be a video card crash since Windows doesn't log anything. I am hesitant to install the latest drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 video card since I read that only the approved drivers from the ASUS site should be used. Those haven't been upgraded since 2010. I went ahead and did try the latest drivers from the ATI site but the system continued to crash. There are earlier threads about gaming users replacing the heat sink compound with some fancy silver-based material (Arctic Silver) to remedy crashes. Trouble is this would void the warranty. I’m not sure how the video card is cooled, either in conjunction with the CPU or separately. Now that I'm outside the warranty period I might investigate this further. MB

 

Hello fellow N71J owners,

I have finally decided to change thermal paste on my notebook. In the last or so year, the performance has slowed down considerably, mostly video tasks. I cannot even play 10 year old games without video being jerky and lagging. Even watching 2 youtube videos gives it fits and firefox plugin container is taking up a lot of CPU.
Anyway, I need the disassembly manual, and all links I could find are dead already. Are there any recent working links for the manual?
Thanks beforehand!

 

Here you go::

http://gentechpcforums.com/Images/Asus/manuals/N71VN Series Chapter 02-v1.0.pdf

 

awesome! thanx a lot!

 

Dear fellows, its me again with some good news - at least for me (n71jq owner).

After one year and a full restore with a couple of freezes (sometimes 5 in a hour), after testing different operating systems (win7, winxp, ubuntu, gnome) and also replacing my hdd, i've no freezes by now.

But how i get to this point? The last thing i wanted to check was the extremly high temperature of the components (maybe a broken heatpipe or something).

While i was playing some highend dx11 games i've measured cpu temperatures of 98° c and gpu 106° c - i'm sure everybody would agree that this is too damn high.

So i've decided to replace the heatsink paste. And yeah - what should i say? After 2 hours of cleaning and renew the paste ( arctic silver 5) , i've tested it again and now - 4 weeks later - on 99% workload still 80° C cpu and 95° C gpu but what is clearly more important: NO FREEZES ANYMORE!

 

It will soon be my turn to replace my thermal paste. I think I will go with the Arctic Silver 5 product also. The specs read pretty good. I will report back when finished and hopefully have some good news.

 

Hey, that's great! Mine is still going strong, despite the fact that I spilled stuff on the keyboard again and had to replace the keyboard. What hard drive did you put in?

 

Since I want to work with some video editing and 3d software, I decided that I want to update my graphics card driver. I had never updated it before.

I went here support.amd.com/en-us/download
There I downloaded the AMD Mobility Radeon™ Driver Verification Tool (13.12)

First time installing it, the laptop restarted on it's own during installation. When it turned back on I had a low resolution. Icons and everything looked big.
I tried installing it a second time, which seemed like it worked but everything still looked big. Also when I went on device manager, the display adapter was showing a warning or something that it wasn't working correctly.
Then I did a system restore to go back to the previous driver.

How do you guys update your graphics card driver?

I was look at the ASUS N61JQ Driver Thread but is seems quite outdated.
Then I found a continuation of that thread but the link there for the graphics driver just goes to support.amd.com/en-us/download

There's also the support page on asus website with driver downloads: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. -Support- Drivers and Download N71Jq

Which driver should I install? And where should I get it from?
Or should I just keep my current driver? I haven't had a problem or anything. I just thought I'd get better performance for video editing and 3d stuff by updating it.

Thanks!

 

Yeah, I went through the graphics card driver update foolishness also. ASUS continues to retain proprietary control on most of the hardware in this deck well after warranty expiration. And in that, most of the hardware won't work right without the ASUS drivers. I think the latest ATI driver from the ASUS website will be the VGA_ATI_Win7_64_z869210 file. That should get everything working properly again. After trying several updates from the AMD site without success, I reverted back to that driver file. I think the last driver file from the AMD site that I used with some success, at least a couple of months, was the VGA_ATI_Win7_64_868000 file. What about the future then? Probably no way to upgrade the OS to Windows 8.1 without suitably adjusted hardware drivers from ASUS. Programmed obsolescence once again. At least Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 or so. I guess that is as good as it gets.

 

After experiencing sudden system shutdowns when playing 3D-games for a while, I first cleaned out the dust from the fan. This has helped for a little while, but the shutdowns came back. As advised in this forum, I started monitoring the temperature and was quite shocked.

I've used FurMark to stress my GPU, HeavyLoad to stress the CPU and CpuId HardwareMonitor to monitor the temparetures of CPU and GPU.

Before thermal paste replacement:
Running Idle: CPU 80C, GPU 82C.
Full stress of CPU and GPU: CPU >100C, GPU 110C. After about three minutes (when CPU went over 100C), the system would shut down automatically.

After thermal paste replacement (Arctic Silver 5, and using the Arctic cleaning liquid to remove the old stuff):
Running Idle: CPU 56C, GPU 58C.
Full stress of CPU and GPU: CPU 80C, GPU 86C. No more system shutdown

The operation took me +/- 1.5 hours. I used the dis-assembly manual as provided a few posts back. When doing this yourself, please note the different sizes of the screws. I used different cups to store the different screws, and wrote down in the printed dis-assembly manual which screws went where.
Also beware the little pads underneath the heatsink that cover the GPU memory chips. These come off quite easy while removing the heatsink and removing the old paste. Maybe it's good to replace these as well, although I managed to re-use the existing ones...

Thanks from a yet-again happy N71-user for the tips & trick in this forum!

 

Hi guys!

I was wondering if someone tried an upgrade of the OS to 8.1 yet too? I did this a few days ago and I was quite happy because everything went smoothly and system is now as fast as never before. I also managed to get some of the hotkeys working (the important ones like volume, etc. though).

Unfortunately I am experiencing some freezes lately. Only help: forced power down. Strange thing is that it is not happening during stressful applications like games or something. It happens in some time like 5 minutes after I hit the power button. Sometimes I freezes directly at the Windows start up logo, sometimes when I try to log in into Windows and even sometimes when I'm already logged in. But I never had a freezes after some, let's say, "critical time". I also monitored the temperatures with CPUID and look quite ok. 60 degrees for both CPU and GPU in idle. Only in games GPU will get up to 100 degrees, CPU under 80 degrees.

I have the newest graphics card driver installed. I also looked into the event manager to review some protocols and there are some failures but nothing at the time the freezes occur. I'm hoping for Update 1 for Win 8.1 to come out and also the catalyst 14.2. Maybe it will help, maybe not.

Do you have any suggestions to my problem what to do to evaluate what the freezes cause? Thanks a lot!

 

Hi Slubbyda !
I also successfully installed Windows 8.1 and everything seems to be ok, except the volume hotkeys which don't work, that's why I'm curious to know what you did to get them working ?

 

Hi Dixbit,

I took the ATK Hotkey Utility for Win7 x64 from the ASUS website and installed it. Volume hotkeys work (not the play button and the one with the little running man ) and also some of the Fn keys (volume, calculator).

Can you tell me what drivers you have installed yourself? E.g. have you used the driver suggested by the Windows Update for the Qualcomm Wireless Adapter? Or which graphics card driver do you use? Thanks!

 

This has probably been discussed before, but has anyone figured out how to fix this issue: After updating to the latest AMD Mobility Radeon drivers, the back lighting turns off once the computer boots into Windows. Or will I have to just go back to stock drivers? Laptop has been flashed to the latest 208 BIOS. Thanks.

 

My notebook gave me a scare yesterday.
Due to some circumstances, I have had internet at home for a few months. Finally yesterday I got connected, and started browsing internet. I was watching some streaming videos, when my notebook just died - black screen and power off. And when I tried to turn it on, it would just die again at different point of booting up - sometimes as quick as at ASUS welcome message, sometimes while booting OS. One time it survived as far as the login screen, and one time I went into BIOS and was just looking at settings when it died. It was always the same - screen goes black and notebook powers off by itself.
Anyone experienced this? I've had it for awhile, almost 5 years now, and as I posted already in this thread, it has been slowing down a lot recently, but never so bad with crashing. What could it be? RAM? HD? CPU or GPU? I mean, crashing when I am just looking at BIOS, no load on the system...
I let it be for a couple of hours, ran errands, and after that, after a few more crashes, it runs now, but I am scared to run anything serious.
Also, I opened it up yesterday and looked at RAM. It has some colored little sticker on one side, which is pink/purple now. Anyone has any idea if maybe the color means that RAM was overheated at some point? Just a guess.
Thanks everyone!

 

Is the USB3 controller in this laptop the NEC/Renesas uPD720200 or uPD720200a? Can't seem to find that information and want to make sure I install the correct driver/firmware for it.

Also, is there any teardown guide? I think I've half killed the gpu/fan/heatsink from stupidly trying out some mining software on the gpu (bad idea on a laptop!).

Thanks.

 

Post #2133 has a teardown document for a similar laptop. Just go back one page in this thread. Don't know about the USB3 driver, other than what is available from ASUS.

 

Could be overheating, a problem I still have with mine and plan to fix someday by replacing the thermal paste with Arctic Silver. Mine doesn't shut down though, it just locks up. Have to force a shutdown by holding the power button down. You might try a monitoring application, like HW Monitor, to see what temps you are experiencing.

 

I get this problem from time to time as well; the laptop hangs at some point during or shortly after the boot up process.

Anyway.. a new problem today - the DVD drive is suddenly no longer working! In device manager it has an exclamation mark icon and says "Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)". Where can I get drivers for it to reinstall?

For quick reference, it is HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW (CT21N).

Strangely, my virtual CD drive (Daemon Tools) has the same problem. I've tried removing this and the physical drive but they just get redetected and are not working.

Thanks.

 

There isn't a specific driver for this device available from the ASUS site. I believe it uses a driver from the OS (Win7 64bit). Check the device properties again and see if the Roll Back Driver option on the Drivers tab is grayed out. If not, try rolling it back. Otherwise, I would suggest a system restore, which is covered in you user manual. Win 7 does tend to take care of itself but corruption can and does occur. In 4 years of near daily use I've only restored my laptop once. It was to fix system hangs when watching DVD's. That fixed it for a while, but the hangs came back. Believe now it is heat related. If you elect to restore, make sure you either remove all the files you wish to retain or back them up on an external device or the other internal hard drive. Good luck.