* Asus N61JQ Owners Lounge *

If I get a backlit keyboard for my laptop, would my keys actually be lit? Even though my laptop did not come with a backlit keyboard. If I remove replace my old keyboard for my laptop with this new backlit one, would that void my warranty? I was thinking of getting one like this:

NEW ASUS N61VF N61VN N61Ja N61Jq N61Jv Keyboard BACKLIT | eBay

 

Yes, it will void the warranty.


I believe you would need to mess with the wires inside the PC to have a power source connection...

But the ebay title says there is some kind of connector...

 

In a way warranty kind of sucks!

 

Yeah... -shakes fist at ASUS's warranty-

Altough, you can wait until your warranty expires, then mod the laptop. Though, research on how to disassemble the laptop first.

http://www.gentechpc.com/Asus/N61JQ/N61VN Series Chapter 02-v1.0.pdf

Here's a guide.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/507561-n71jq-backlight-keyboard-implementation.html#post6567857

Here is Turbogear's awesome guide to install a backlit jeyboard on a N71Jq.

 

Can dust affect computer performance. Because I just vacuumed my air vents, and my game seems to running better. Not the way it used to be as far as fps goes. And I am not getting as much lag spikes. And my temps were staying around 91 C, compared to the 95 C I was getting before.

I was also able to put some of my settling higher in SC2. Middle-High, compared to the Low-Middle

 

That's kinda hot, i live in Tasmania although so my ambients are lower then alot of other places
But yes, vacuuming the dust out will help the fans spin better, and clog up the heat syncs less, this works with any computer. Put it this way, your main enemy is dust and you'll try and do anything to protect your kingdom (Computer) from dust attacking it

 

Hey guys I have some questions!

Is there any way to upgrade my graphics card? Like could I buy the chip and send it into Asus and could they install it for me?

Is this true? I've been wondering if there was a way to tweak my CPU fan speed, or not if its completely automated.

Thanks!

 

Couple of questions regarding my warranty.

1. When I bought my laptop from NewEgg.com, I purchased 2 years extended warranty from them as well. They use Service Net. Was that a mistake on my part. Is there a way I could cancel that warranty and buy another extended warranty from ASUS?

2. This is regarding the Accidental Warranty. I do not have any accidental warranty. Although, I do not think my laptop will get any physical damage, I still wish I had some warranty with that.

Here is the reason why I did not get my Accidental Warranty. I bought my laptop in August 2010. I tried to turn in that slip for the warranty, but the post office kept sending it back to me saying, there is no such address. I used the address on the slip. I kind of had messy hand writing, so I wrote the next one really neat. Same problem. So that right there took more than a month with me sending and waiting, and the post office sending it back. If I sent it to the correct address, I would of gotten 2 years Accidental warranty and not 1, since I sent it within 60 days . Then I sent ASUS an email, asking them for the correct address. That right there took like a week for a reply. So I finally sent in the slip, and what do you know. I get a slip from ASUS, saying it have been over 90 or 60 days ( cannot remember what it said). You think if I were to explain this problem to ASUS, they would give my 2 years accidental warranty, it would leave me with about 1 year left. I tried to respond to the ASUS employee who sent me an the email reply, and she just said, it over the days. I tried to explain it again, and she just ignored me. Not a big deal, but I would like to get everything I paid good money for.

 

yeah i know, i've never RMA'd anything, and anyone outside of the US can't get the ADW..
Their regular 2 year warrantys pretty good though, and the NewEgg warranty should be good, i don't think you could swap the warranty with an Asus one. If anything goes wrong with it i'm sure Newegg will be fast and good. They seem pretty good.

At the person wanting to swap the graphics card, NO you cannot, you are stuck with the 5730M forever!
It's impossible as it's built into the motherboard, you can see it if you take the keyboard out...

 

Hi, I was trying to see if I needed a BIOS update with some of the problems I have been adding. Except, when I go to the ASUS download website, the only description they give me for the BIOS opitions are, "Firmware Change". That does me no good.

And they say to figure out which Bios I have, they told me to look at my mother board, but if I open my laptop, that will void my warranty. Any other way to check?

Around what temperatures do you guys get while doing some gaming? I get around 90-96 C, when playing new games like StarCraft II.

 

unfortunately, i don't think the graphics card is easily upgradable

that seems quite high...

i get high 70s to low 80s when playing SCII

 

Hi everyone, I'm in a very desperate situation here. I've had my laptop for approximately 6 months, and it's been in near perfect condition ever since. I won't bore you with the details, but the situation I'm in right now is that my bios won't detect the hard-drive of my computer, only the disk drive. I don't have a restore disk but I do have a Windows 7 Ultimate installation disk. Can anyone think of any way to help me? (I also bought the ADW, I don't know if I can use that in this situation if my hard drive is fried or something like that.)

Please help, I desperately need to fix this problem!

 

Sounds like it might be a hard drive failure

You could try this in case the MBR is corrupted: How to repair MBR on Windows 7 | eHow.com

 

Thanks for the advice, however I followed all of the instructions on there which led me to another error "BOOTMGR is missing". I then proceeded to follow a guide to fix THAT error, which failed. Thank you for the help though!

I do have one more question: If I manually replace the hard drive instead of sending it to ASUS, A. do you think that will fix the problem and B. will that void my ADW warranty?

 

Bootmgr missing usually means you have the boot drive not configured in the bios.

 

Yup, but that goes back to the root of my problem which is that my disk isn't detected in BIOS and thus I'm not able to configure it.

 

I think you would want to invoke your regular warranty. ADW (Accidental Damage Warranty) is a one-time "get out of jail free" card in case you drop the laptop or in some other way damage it yourself (by accident). The regular warranty may be invoked multiple times within the warranty time period (1-2 years for these laptops, depending on which one and where you got it). They should replace the hard drive for you, for free, assuming that is the problem. The downside is that you may lose your data. If you have access to a hard drive enclosure (something like this), you could hook up your (non-bootable) hard drive and try to backup your data before sending it in.

Edit: Another thing you could try (which is really a long shot) is the following:

I frequently image my main Win7 partition using the free version of this software: Macrium Reflect. It works nicely for backing up the system before installing things or just for peace of mind. When you use it to image a partition and later restore the image, it will ask you what you want to do about the MBR. One of the options is to restore the MBR from the image itself, which is what I normally do; however, if the MBR is corrupted, there is another option to use a "standard Windows XP" MBR, which, according to this post in the support forum, should work fine for booting Win7. I have done this before as a workaround for converting an XP image to a virtual disk drive for VirtualBox (PC emulation). When I transferred the real hard drive partition to the virtual drive, it wouldn't boot in VirtualBox, so I used the Macrium Reflect trick to rewrite the MBR. This is a relatively time-consuming process, and you need another computer and a hard drive enclosure to do it (since you can't boot your system and need access to the hard drive to image it).

 

Thanks a lot for the help, steve!
With the help of my Ubuntu LiveCD I've officially ruled that my hard drive has gone to crap.

Having never dealt with the ASUS support system before, what would you recommend I go about doing (IE how do I get them to fix my laptop). Should I call, submit an inquiry, etc...

OR....I really would like an outside opinion on this idea, since it's something I'm thinking about doing: since I know the hard drive is fried and I have access to another one, should I just replace it and go without the warranty?

 

Pros of invoking the warranty:

1) You get it fixed for free

Cons of invoking the warranty:

1) You get downtime (could be 1-2 weeks before you see your laptop again)

2) Potential headache if they do a shoddy job (e.g. if you send it to the Indiana facility)

Replacing the hard drive yourself should not void your warranty. The user manual even gives graphical instructions on how to do it (it is a common upgrade, along with memory). Also, there's no way they can tell you did it, as long as you keep the old one and reinstall it any time you send it in for repair.

Edit: Just for comparison's sake, here is the exact hard drive that came with my N61JQ-A1 (used PC Wizard to find out the model):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148374

The top-rated 500 GB, 7200-RPM drive on NewEgg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136692

The WD drive has significantly fewer 0-egg reviews. If you do have them replace it under warranty, you will probably receive another "ok" drive like the Seagate. If the replacement drive is higher reliability (like the WD one linked above), it may be worth it to eat the cost just to avoid future data loss. Although my N61JQ has been more-or-less flawless so far (bought it last Feb), I do notice some very occasional robotic click sounds from the hard drive.

 

Wow, that's awesome, as I've been wanting a bigger HDD in my laptop for quite a while. I might give them a call though, just to be absolutely 100% sure.

Anyhow, my final inquiries to you are
1.Is it at all possible that the hard drive is fine and the connector is malfunctioning

and (I'm pretty sure I'm correct about this, but just checking)
2. If I DO buy a hard drive, it's going to be a 2.5" and DOESN'T need to be the same brand as the original one (Seagate) correct?

Thanks for all of your help with my problem!

 

Can anyone help me out with this?

 

Check out the driver thread (link on first page) to see the BIOS changelogs. Not that they are very informative.

To see what version you have, you can either boot into BIOS and look (hit F2 during boot), or run a diagnostic program like CPU-Z (check the Mainboard tab, BIOS section, Version: mine is "N61Jq.210").

1) You can check it by trying out the spare drive you already have. Hard drive swaps are trivial on these laptops.

2) Any 2.5" SATA drive should work, except possibly the large (1 TB) drives which tend to be slightly thicker. Even those may still work, depending on the housing in the laptop. It does not need to be Seagate brand, and chances are good that ASUS ships out these laptops with different brands (common OEM drives are Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc.).

 

hey man. cool link. never saw this post before. judjing by the description, it looks like the BIOS updates will do me now good.

Amway, I am interested in downloading some of those updated drivers. Do you know if I can just download the most updated one, or would I have to update them in order from bottom to top?

 

I just thought I'd share that I went to Best Buy, bought a new (bigger) hard drive, and it's showing up in BIOS. Installing Windows 7 as we speak
Thanks a ton to everyone who answered my questions!

 

I got my N61JQ back from the California RMA center, I'd sent it in for problems with the video card. It looks like they replaced the video card, and also gave me a new battery, which is great because the old one was going, but I figured they'd call it normal wear.

The unit was gone for 10 days, and so far all my problems with it are resolved. I'm pleased with the outcome

Just an FYI.

 

They didn't replace the cideo card, they replaced the entire motehrboard

I'm sure of it because the GPU is motherboard-soldered, so to remove the GPU, you must remove the entire motherboard...

 

You can download any of the categories you wish (e.g. chipset, graphics, etc.) at your own risk. You only need to install the latest one for each category.

 

Hey guys, I am about to send my laptop back for a RMA. Is there any way I can clean all the dust out of my laptop without voiding the warranty, like is there a way I can open it without voiding it, certain areas I can open it from without voiding my warranty? I do not want them to just clean the dust out and send it back to me and say my laptop is fine (I have been having FPS and overheating problems I think). My temps have not been going over 100C, which someone said here that that is where throttling occurs, so I think the graphics card or CPU itself might being have some problems, not a simple dust problem.

If I can open the laptop without voiding the warranty, I will just blow some air and blow all that extra dust out, I will not use the vacuum actually inside the laptop because I know that can cause some sort of static.

Last thing I want is for me to send my laptop back twice. That will be about a month of my summer with out my laptop!.

I already got my vacuum and sucked some dust out of the vents. Compressed air would just blow the dust in different areas I would think.

 

I think BIOS V212 helps with temps, though there is a fan speed bug if you upgraded your ram to 8GB (fan runs at 100% for ~30 seconds whenever you turn on the laptop).

Other than that, I would just update the graphics driver to the latest (currently Catalyst 11.4). The rest of the drivers probably won't do much performance-wise.

 

Hey guys, just checked my BIOS version. I have N61JQ.206. Should I get the N61JQ.212 update, as it might help with temps (at my own risk of course).

If I do decide to get it. Can I just download that 212 one, without out downloading the 210, 208 etc.?

Does updating the BIOS on your own void your warranty?

 

@Shpati Yes you can upgrade the BIOS directly to the newest version, and it does not void your warranty. Please make sure not to flash from an NTFS drive though. See: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/174395-bios-update-guide-asus-notebooks.html

 

I have the N61JQ, I was just confused because it said do not flash from a NTFS drive, even though my whole drive is NTFS. I have a USB card 2GB that is formatted FAT, should I just put the BIOS file on there?

Is it all right to use a external USB flash drive to load the BIOS when updating your BIOS?

If I buy my own thermal paste, grease, or compound etc., and I send it in with my RMA and request ASUS to apply some on for me, would they do it? I just have a feeling they use a cheap Elmer's Glue like of thermal compound.

I was thinking of getting this one:

Newegg.com - ARCTIC COOLING Arctic Cooling MX-4 AC-MX4 4 gram (g) All-Around Thermal Compound

as it is not conductive and got good reviews in temperature drops.

 

No they won't. Unless you send it to a "Local" Asus repair center, Which isn't local for me. And you have to pay them to do it on the hour.
So lets say it takes them 10 minutes to apply it all theres.

Thermal Paste $15-$20
1 Hour of labor (Around $60-$100)

Probably not worth it, untill your warranty is about to run out and just do it yourself. How many months have you got left on it? Because i know for a fact that in any way trying to replace the thermal glue.. I mean paste will void it.

 

I got about 2 more months with ASUS. And I bought 2 years extended warranty with NewEgg who use Service Net for warranty.

It was about 100 bucks for the extra warranty (2 years). At the time I thought I needed it. This is the first laptop I ever owned or bought. And I only had 1 desktop before this, I am a newbie.

This is lame.

Can anyone help me with those 2 questions above? First one is regarding where I can open, unscrew my laptop to clean some of the dust out without voiding my warranty, and the second is regarding is it safe to save the updated BIOS file on a FAT USB drive and load it from there when updating my BIOS for my laptop. It said something like that on the BIOS update guide, but I was just confused. Is that what I am suppose to do?

 

@Shpati flash from easy flash in the bios (F2) and use a FAT USB stick to load the BIOS image.

You won't void your warranty unless you damage your laptop somehow, or break warranty seal stickers which are on the heatsink and sometimes covering screws under the keyboard. If it's obvious that you've taken apart the laptop your warranty could be voided - just use care.

 

All right cool, thank you for the help.

So you think if I use care and unscrew some of the openings and blow the excess dust out, I would be fine as far as warranty goes? Basically my question is, are the stickers pretty obvious to see. Will I not break a seal on accident because the stickers were sort of hidden.

I just want to get all the dust out before they think that is the problem (which I think it is not)

 

Dust is normal I don't think you need to worry about it unless it's extreme.

If you take off the panel it should be ok, the warranty stickers are yellow with red text. Again they are usually only on the heatsink near the CPU, GPU, and sometimes on the upper portion of the chassis underneath the keyboard covering a screw.

 

Can anyone here recommend some good cooling devices while gaming or using this laptop as a desktop while at home. Like a cooling mat. I have this cooling mat:

Newegg.com - Thermaltake Notebook cooler Model CLN0008

And I think it really sucks. Especially now because I just checked my temps before and after. Believe it or not, while playing SC2, my temps were running at high 70s and Mid 80s for like 20 min, then they got to the 90s. So that cooling mat really did me no good at all as for a temps go. If anything it made it worse.

I was thinking of getting this one:

Newegg.com - ZALMAN Notebook Cooler Model ZM-NC2000 Black

As some of the reviews said it lowered there temps almost as much as 20 C while gaming, beats mine which gives no temps drops at all.

Anyone got some recommendations. Is a cooling mat/platform the only the only cooling device you can get for a laptop. Are there any others? What do you guys think I should get.

 

The problem is that the air intake slots are at the front like under where the palmrest is, since that's where most coolers have padding or some kind of border that area doesn't get a lot of airflow from them. The NC2000 might be OK but I'm not sure it's going to be much better than what you have now.

 

It's not your cooling mat; it's the laptop. I have the above cooler, and I can say that it does NOT work for this laptop. The MAX temperature drop you will see is 1-2 degrees. These coolers only work well for laptops which transmit a lot of heat through the bottom (N61JQ vents out the side).

As for upgrading BIOS, here is my technique (using a USB thumb drive): link

 

Yea I think your are right.

The Zalman model is 12.52" x 15.75" x 1.67", while mine is 360(L) x 319(W) x 52(H) mm.

The Zalman seems to have more length, which might help as I can move my laptop more up to get some air in those vents. Zalman has 15.75 while mine has 14.7 length (360 mm converted to inches). Unless I am wrong and the 12.52 is actually the length of the Zalman, which I doubt. Plus Zalman has better air flow I believe and better reviews.

Thank you for the help.

Ah man thank you for your advice. That is 60 bucks I will be saving over the summer. I was really thinking about buying that one too.

So there is no cooling devices for ASUS N61JQs that actually work?

 

I got a $4 Generic cooler off ebay once, it was alright.. Kinda flimsy, it dropped 1c at most. So not worth it, there are a few coolers that work, but for the cost + less battery life and hassle of carrying it 3-4c isn't worth it..

At the warranty issue/question
Yes you can open your laptop up etc, just don't rip/remove any of the warranty stickers..

The one on my CPU has half peeled away, ugh i'm going to have trouble if they see that

Anyway, i've got a "Consider Replacing your battery" message today, i'll try pulling it in and out. See what it does
Anyone else had this problem?

Also removing the charger fixes the problem, but it says its fully charged when i'm on battery. And that i'm not when it's plugged in? :s So confused

EDIT: Working fine now, still watching it though.

 

Does anyone use SSD here ?
I'm interested to install a 60-90GB SSD as my boot drive, while moving the original HD to the optical bay, but I'm reluctant to make a move because of many horror stories I've heard about problems with detection when paired with certain OEM laptop like Lenovo, Toshiba & Mac.
Even Corsair technical guy does not recommend anyone to pair their SSD with OEM laptops unless recommended by the OEM.
I almost bought Corsair Force F90 SSD yesterday , but I'm holding it now after reading about the compatibility problems.
There is very little information about which SSD works in this laptop.
I certainly do not want to bet my $200 just to see if it works with N61JQ.

So, can anyone tell me which SSD they bought & tested ?

 

I use an SSD, a Crucial C300 120 gb. I gotta say I love it!

It was as simple as plug in and play and my computer runs ridiculously fast now. The 7200 RPM that comes with the N61JQ sort of bottlenecks the incredible performance potential it has.

I bought Crucial because the SSD had 5 eggs on newegg, and I just like Crucial in general. They have great products and reliability.

I was on the fence for a while about buying a SSD but I finally just winged it - I don't regret it at all.

 

Does a SSD, help with gaming performance? As far as upgrading parts goes, that is really what I only care about. I can wait a few more minutes for my laptop to boot up up (as of right now ).

BTW, can anyone here tell me if they upgraded the RAM to 8GB. How was that as far as performance goes, any increase in gaming performance? How much faster was your computer?

I was thinking of buying 8GBs of Crucial. Gave the link below. This one had the best rating for the N61JQ-X1.

Newegg.com - Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Laptop Memory Model CT2KIT51264BC1067

 

The only performance boost an SSD really gives gaming is less loading time and maybe a little less lag if the game requires a lot of rendering from files.

I also have 8 GB of Gskill RAM. Unless you're going to do some heavy multitasking or something that requires intense memory usage (which most people don't), it's not really gonna provide that much of a performance boost. As for gaming performance, it's the same reasoning. If it's a heavy duty game with lots of memory required, then naturally you'll see a performance boost, but most games don't require 8 gb of RAM to run smoothly.

 

Anyone know if Asus Live Update works for the N61JQ-JX021X?
I think mine never worked ever since i got this laptop, which was about 1 year ago.

How do you guys automatically update your N61JQ without having to manually download each file from the website?

Thanks

 

I don't, i just do them all individually. Tbh i hate automatic updaters in general unless its game patches. 'cos so much stuff can go wrong, and it installs all the crap and bloatware too.
Stuff like Windows Update do this, so i ALWAYS go through every single update and check if i need/want it.

It's safer this way imo.

Btw the Automatic update never worked for me either, idk what exact Model i have but yeah.

 

Does anyone use SSD here ?
I'm interested to install a 60-90GB SSD as my boot drive, while moving the original HD to the optical bay, but I'm reluctant to make a move because of many horror stories I've heard about problems with detection when paired with certain OEM laptop like Lenovo, Toshiba & Mac.
Even Corsair technical guy does not recommend anyone to pair their SSD with OEM laptops unless recommended by the OEM.
I almost bought Corsair Force F90 SSD yesterday , but I'm holding it now after reading about the compatibility problems.
There is very little information about which SSD works in this laptop.
I certainly do not want to bet my $200 just to see if it works with N61JQ.

So, can anyone tell me which SSD they bought & tested ?[/QUOTE]

see my sig, installation was a breeze, the only problem that you may encounter is installing WIN7 onto SSD. although it;s a bit PITA but it's really worth it. as for getting SSD, get what i have. just a suggestion though but highly recommended

here are the results :

 

Is it possible to change the colour/turn off the side LEDs on the N61JQ? I've seen a N61JQ-looking laptop on campus with bright blue side LEDs, so unless it was another model that looks exactly the same...