Asus G50vt-X1 -- TPM and Vista Ultimate?

Hello. I just purchased a new* Asus G50VT-X! laptop. Nice solid unit, though I will be adding a second hard drive and 9 cell battery.

It comes with Vista Home Premium, but I would like to upgrade to Vista Ultimate and make use of Bitlocker.

Has anybody with this, or similar, model upgraded to Ultimate and used Bitlocker?

Thanks!

* This unit was a clearance item at Best Buy; floor model and out for only two weeks (apart from two small nicks on the back looks very new) and the manual and recovery disc could not be found. For net price of $825, I have zero complaints.

 

Why not use TrueCrypt instead of BitLocker? I prefer using a password to encrypt rather than rely on keys that need to be backed up in a secure place etc.

There should be no problem upgrading to Ultimate, the drivers should work.

Given you do not have the recovery disks be careful not to touch the recovery partition on the HDD.

 

I suggest making a mirror of the hidden recovery partition to an external HDD. Then in theory, if something failed, you could transfer it to the new HDD and get back to the factory setting. Although the odds are that Windows 7 will come out before your HDD fails, and sounds like Win7 > Vista.

 

Thanks! I will look that up. (Mine was a floor model and they reimaged it from their master CD; one I could not get a copy of. If that CD recreated the whole partitioning system, then I'm okay. If not, no biggie. I'll be making an image of my drive before installing any encryption...

 

Didn't Win7 break Adobe Photoshop CS4? Sounds like it has some extra DRM. Vista has grown on me too, and maybe SP2 will reduce the memory requirement... or if it is stable, I'll upgrade the laptop with Win7 and leave my desktop alone; nothing wrong with Vista apart from RAM usage, but with 8GB on the desktop, that's never a problem.

 

I have nothing useful to add, just wanted to say you got a hell of a deal!

 

I'd keep Vista for now.

 

I had a quick side-question (not to hijack this thread!) about that.

My G50VT-X1's (also from Best Buy, although not as good a deal... paid $1250, and a month later it was marked down to $999 ) copy of Vista got kinda icky/slow, so I figured I'd reformat it with a friend's retail copy of Home Premium (same OS that came on the laptop) only to find that, unlike some other manufacturers, my license of Home Premium did NOT work off of a fresh retail CD install - strange as they were the same version of Vista.

Anyway I then realized I had lost my recovery CDs... any idea if there's a way to do a Vista format from that partition? I see the 10GB recovery partition, but have no idea how, if at all, I could access that partition to help do a fresh format of Vista... prefferably before the 29 days I have left to fail to register the install I have now

 

Upon bootup, keep pressing F9 until it boots from the recovery partition. Depending on how much you press F9, you might get a boot screen option that says Windows Vista [EMS Setup] (or something like that), which is what you want.

 

hey, got my asus g50vt-x1 at best buy too on open box clearance for $800!

anyway, i am very pleased, i have until tuesday to take it back, but i plan on keeping it

i want to know how you can make a recovery disc from the recovery partition on the hard drive, ya know like back it up to a dvd or something

oh and where can i get a 9 cell battery for this baby!

have fun with your computers!

 

I believe your G50 should already come with a recovery disk.

For the 9 cell battery, you can get them from the Asus estore or from GenTechPC.

 

Probably because it was open box, they lost the disks somewhere. That's a pity.

I do not think ASUS offer the possibility of making recovery disks from the partition, like HP for instance. You will need to guard that partition carefully. Also back it up with a partition backup software such as Acronis True Image -- in that way you might also be able to transfer it to a new hard drive in case you ever upgrade it. (not sure that would work though, I have never tried it)

 

You certainly can transfer the recovery partition to a new HDD, I transferred it back to my RAID0 setup. It seemed to work fine, except it crashed or froze at a certain point during the boot sequence, probably because the factory setting is not RAID compatible. I'm 99% sure it will work okay for non-RAID setups.

Just make sure you called the partition "RECOVERY" and after copying it over, you have to make it hidden or pressing F9 won't work.