Asus G1S + laptopvideo2go = dead machine?

Hey everyone. I recently had an experience with an Asus G1S and wanted to share it here.

It starts out like this. I bought a G1S at the end of 2007. I used it primarily for schoolwork and occasional gaming for around 6 months before it suddenly died on me. The screen went black and nothing I did could get an output from it. The lights on the laptop would come on, I could hear Windows running in the background, but there was simply no display, even when hooked to an external monitor.

I had a full warranty so I sent it to the Asus plant for inspection. While I never get a clear answer as to what the problem was, they did tell me that the entire motherboard was replaced. It seemed pretty serious, but I figured that the problem shouldn't arise again after the repair.

Unfortunately, last month the exact same thing happened, again. Same symptoms: no screen, everything else was running. I forget whether I had a 2 year warranty or if they extended it after I sent it in the first time, but luckily the thing was still covered and it went back to the plant again. This time however they had no parts in stock and were unable to repair it, so they sent me an new laptop as a replacement.

My question here now is how this issue came around in the first place. Seeing how large the Asus brand is, it puzzles me that such a major issue could arise from one of their more expensive models. Nevertheless, I am led to believe this may not have entirely been Asus's fault. Prior to the first meltdown I was tweaking a couple of games, namely Oblivion and Crysis, and installed the video drivers from laptopvideo2go.com. The only real problem I've actually been able to pinpoint is that the sleep function goes faulty with the third party drivers, but I somehow feel that they were also linked to the motherboard issue.

The other reason I can think of is that since I may have overused the machine. I normally turn my laptop on as soon as I get up in the morning, and leave it on throughout the day regardless of whether I'm using it or not. I do have a cooling pad plugged in at all times, but these models get pretty warm regardless, especially after a night or two of continued gaming.

Anyway, after this particular experience I am hesitant to try out another gaming laptop from Asus. As I stated in another thread I'm already trying to sell the new machine. I'm not really interested in looking further into the matter, but I felt that this experience might help some people in case someone runs into a similar issue in the future.

Thanks for reading.

 

Have you heard of the Nividia Geforce 8xxx series problems? If not, I would suggest you to do a quick search on google. Lots of reading for you.

 

Yeah, I would suggest reading about the Nvidia 8600 GT failures. This is what caused your problem. There is actually a class action lawsuit going on over this (or so I've read) however, ASUS isn't included in this lawsuit. I sent in my G1s over two weeks ago for repair for this very same problem. Now that I've heard you are having the SAME problem after getting it repaired... well, it doesn't make me very confident in ASUS...

 

The issue with your ASUS notebook appears to be related to the Nvidia faulty GPU. As such ASUS is not directly at fault for the manufactoring error you've faced, but it appears they have done what they could to assist you and keep their customer satisfied. The problem lies with the faulty soldering of the G84 and G86 Nvidia Geforce Mobile architecture and this news was released by Nvidia last year after a large number of these graphics card failures were surfacing. In fact this issue of faulty GPU has been more common with Dell and HP notebooks equipped with these chips while even Apple Macbook Pro’s face the same issue. Personally I believe of all the notebook companies, ASUS has handled this situation the best commonly replacing the affected Geforce 8600M GT with the newer Geforce 9500M GS or a lot of times replacing the laptop itself with a newer and much more powerful model.