Asus Q550LF-BBI7T07 (Best Buy Exclusive ???)

My Q550 has been running very well until I got the idea to upgrade a driver for the Qucik Charge USB feature. I did the upgrade and a restart and suddenly my touchscreen no longer responded, and the USB ports were blocked out. Fearing of having to do a recovery, I tried rolling the driver back by installing the previous 2013 version of the USB charger driver, did a restart and everything is now back to normal. Maybe there was just an issue with my machine and the install of the new driver. But thought I would throw it out there if you ever plan a driver upgrade down the road.

 

What was the version you downloaded?

 

3.1.8... I reverted back to 3.1.7.

I do have the most recent version of Windows 8.1.

 

First to touch on a couple of the questions I seen a couple posts back that were unanswered.
IF YOU HAVE FAN MAX RPM ISSUES UPDATE THE BIOS TO 211 MINIMUM. I started with 207, then 208, 211 and now 212 using the winflash utility on ASUS site with 0 issues.
Someone was asking if this was dual fan? No, single. There is 2 heatsinks center of the mobo running to the single fan that is a little left of center and exhausts on the hinge, watch your screen gets hot. Most laptops have a max temp threshold of 100c, playing WoW on high I get 40-60 fps and about 80c but that is WITH a cooling pad.
To take the bottom cover off and access RAM, HDD, ect you need a T5 Torx. Pretty much guaranteed that any “sets” you have will not have a T5. I know Sears has them.
Here is a pic of the inside I took.
http://tinypic.com/r/ml3wg3/8
Out of the box I noticed it was VERY loud, the fans would ramp up and stay at max RPM the entire time it was on, called Asus and was told that "fans make noise as normal operation. Had to explain about active cooling and how the fans do not run at max 100% of the time to which the Asus rep stated "can I ask how you got this information" while talking I noticed a BiOS update on Asus site, Oh yes, being a Best Buy Exclusive searching Asus for Q550LF will come up with no results, needs to go Asus/support only. So out of the box I had to flash the BiOS, issue was not fixed. 4 Bios updates and finally the fan is fixed.
The external subwoofer adds excellent sound but for some reason they used a very weak micro jack, first time I forgot I had it plugged in and picked it up, snap went the micro jack and the Geek squad is horrible, 120 dollars for a "tune up," sickening.
On best buys site this was advertised as having "8 way processing" I know that is just a quad core hyperthreaded and again on Best Buys site, in the Q&A section an Asus rep is still on their stating that the "i7 processors are quad cores," regardless, it is a dual core Haswel ultra low power consumption 1.8 Ghz, does stay about 2.76/2.96 Ghz with the stock OC multiplier. Either way you look at it a dual core is not a quad core, regardless of hyperthreading and in no way shape or form does this have "eight way processing," I have a substantial review on their site, since my review they have corrected the cores of the processor in the description page.
I have only had this 7 months and while there have not been any costs to fix anything that has gone wrong it seems like something is ALWAYS going wrong. I love this laptop, the look, feel, GPU, battery, touch screen, display, all just awesome, I even got my girlfriend to buy this exact model when she went to upgrade from her 4 year old MacBook Pro, she has had it 4 month, for some reason her printer keeps falling off the network since she started using this and is currently getting spammed, really badly actually "a device has been unplugged from the headphone jack," she hasn’t used the headphone jack as far as I'm aware.
Mine has recently developed an “issue…” Oh this one is fun, this is my baby I keep it perfect condition, nothing has spilled on it, the left shift, left control, fn, spacebar, B, N, main "enter" key and the 0 on the number pad are not working, well they work sporadically, there is no rhyme or reason one minute everything is like butter next minute… RAWR… Rebooting makes no difference. Asus will say "this laptop has a harder button press them most," sure it probably does but NOT like this, you literally have to pound those keys listed and maybe the will work, maybe, calling Asus again tonight, I am a full time college student, I can’t afford to be without my computer yet writing a paper is... Angering. Asus has the same laptop on their site for the same price as this, same specs too, except it has a true i7 quad core 3.0. I would avoid the best buy exclusive.

 

Thanks for all that info 151rum. I was able to confirm the single fan cooler from some replacement bored (I mis-represented motherboard had 2 so I thought it was using 2 fans for a while).

One thing, and I can't believe I did not notice this until now, the battery is internal (Despite admiring the chassie so many times I did not notice the lack of a pull out battery). Any luck on identifying possible replacements for when the time comes to get a new one?

 

Soooo.. I just got done skinning my screen. I am one of those people who like to keep everything staying shiny so I buy skins for all my devices. And this large 15 inch shiny beauty showing off a 1080p ips screen was no exception. The trick with this laptop is no one has a skin FOR this model of laptop, infact most pre-cut laptop skins are for macbooks cause of the popularity of just one model. Sooo I decided to put bestskinsever to the test, again. I have been a long time user of bestskinsever but my last several devices have been other brands simply because bestskinsever did not support them. I commented long ago about custom size cuts and about 6 months ago they finally emailed me back saying tada, they allowed ordering of cuts to your specifications.

Unfortunately the caps on those dimensions were a little short for this laptop, and while I could have ordered the skins to cover at least the view able area of the screen, I wanted to go a bit further. So instead I ordered from them something else they now recently sell, DIY sheets of polyurethane that you cut yourself. I choose the largest 12x24 sheet as the next smallest would miss covering the tops and bottoms still.

marking out the screen dimensions on the paper side was easy as the urethane side had some sticky properties to the screen so I was able to overlay it and then draw my lines with a ruler without it slipping around, as well as marking out the camera and microphone ports. They say you can use an exacto-knife to cut but I found mine was not able to cut deep enough so I felled back to scissors. My edges weren't as straight as I would like them but I did use the knife to flatted any jaggies from when I had to stop the scissors. I was afraid I would have to cut inwards for the camera and mic ports but after a test, I found a hole puncher works just fine (Needed to use the knife to finish removing the hole punch). All in all I made a quick job out of it (I should purchase better cutting tools for my next one) and it turned out fine. Luckily I had a baking dish that was large enough to dunk the sheet in, I like to use the bowl of water method for my skin applications.

My biggest tip for any laptop applications though, make sure the screen is level on the table. My first attempts where with the screen open normally and this caused all the water to drain to the bottom on both the screen and skin. This made the top half dry out quicker, but the top half is the one with the holes I need to line up so I needed the skin to be moveable after draping it on bottom-first. Having a second set of hands may make things easier too, this is a fairly large sheet and if it gets a little dry and it folds onto itself, there is a chance that pulling it apart can damage it. This happened once and I quickly submerged it into the pan and carefully pulled apart the overlap. That said when I propped the laptop up and leveled out the screen, the skin slid on with no problems and was slipping and sliding longer after I finished adjusting it. Infact I kind of had to leave the screen in a state where a lot of water was left under it. Most attempts to squeegee out the water would cause the screen to shift. I made an attempt to get much of the water out but realized I would just need to leave it to dry normally (It was seeping out the bottom edge for about an hour after I finished). This also ment that most air bubbles left under the screen would be left to fix themselves. There is one last crucial step you should do here before the screen is no longer movable, and that is to check for hard dirt that may have gotten under the skin during the whole process. Observing the surface of the skin you may note a bump that has more of a point on it that you cannot press in. Now is the time to peel back the closest corner and use something like a credit card (clean plastic edge) to get that out.

When all is done, just leave your laptop upside down overnight. It should be usable immediately after applying it but you don't want to touch it for at least 24 hours, and don't play with the bubbles. Attempting to push them around while the surrounding area has already dried can cause the skins to ripple and give you a permanent looking stretch mark. It can take up to 5 days (or longer in a skin this size) but they will disappear.

In the end i got the skin for under $19 during a sale, but normal price of the 12x24 sheet is $29. During my attempt to find cheaper sheets, I kept finding people using vinyl skin coverings which are much cheaper. Don't be fooled, vinyl is polyvinyl chloride, not polyurethane.

 

Hey guys - there was recently a good deal on this on ebay and I snagged one.

My question is - have any of you guys successfully used a msata SSD in the msata slot (rather than replacing the existing hard drive or optical bay)? If so, how did you go about cloning the drives and getting the computer to boot of the msata drive?

I know the mSata slot is "half height" but some people have been successful in putting in a full height mSata with some electrical tape. Would also love to hear about this if anyone has done this.

 

Can one tell me where is the extra empty msata port?
thx in advance

 

I read through this post and found a lot of good info. I just got a refurb q550lf. I did the BIOS update and have used Asus backtrack to get a recovery USB setup. I want to replace the HDD with an SSD. (Samsung 840EVO) Because this is a refurb I understand that the boot partition is removed during the wipe. From reading the posts here, I'm concerned that if replace the SSD and try to restore from the recovery USB I set up I will not be able to get it to restore to the SDD. I'm not sure that I'll get it to boot. I have found that I can only get into the setup info on the current HD when I hit F2 after a restart. I haven't been able to get it to work after cold start even with pressing it right away. I'd appreciate any input or instructions if someone has done something similar and can advise.

 

I used Aconis-2013 to get an exact replica of the stock hdd onto a Seagate SSD. I have all 5 partitions cloned. It's well worth doing. See page 13 for how I did it.

 

Thanks for the info. My son made a recommendation since I didn't have a external HD enclosure so I ended up doing it different. It might help someone else so I'll list it here.

I ended up using Asus Backtracker to do a recovery to a USB stick. I then swapped out the hard drive for a Samsung 250gb SSD. For anyone new to how to get the back off, I found that after removing the screws, I worked from the upper rt corner near the hinge and loosened it all the way around and gently separated it. I had to remove the metal brace holding the CD Rom to get access to the HD and then removed the screws, swapped the hard drive, screwed everything back in. The screws did not quite go in as far on the Samsung but it did not impact anything when I reseated it. Putting the cover back on I pressed all around the edges. You'll hear small clicks as it goes in place and then screwed everything back in. I put in my USB stick and powered on. It came up with the AsusBacktracker menu and then I selected to start the recovery. It took about 20-30 min and then asked me to remove the USB drive and reboot. System powered up like it was new and I re-entered the settings. I did test the USB drive with the recovery on it prior to starting the swap on the drives. It booted into the Asus Backtracker and I just canceled out. This way I was sure it was bootable.

This was on a refurb I got from Newegg so I wasn't sure if the recovery would work. Seems okay for now. Sure boots fast with the SSD.

Here are some hints on how to get to BIOS etc... I found I could only get in from a restart when tapping the keys.
ESC - takes you to a boot menu
F2 - Takes you to BIOS and Advanced Setup
F9 -- Takes you to a Asus Recovery, Diagnostic screen

To all who have posted on this thread, thank you. There is so much good info on this machine and things you have all learned. And thanks to "havec" for instructions on cloning which gave me a backup plan if this didn't work.

 

Make sure we all bookmark this thread for future use.

 

Could I similarly use this ASUS Backtracker if I'm trying to make an mSATA drive into the primary drive? I just got a 120 gb SSD mSATA to put in the computer and hoped to just keep the 1tb drive as storage as well.

 

Yes you can, but watch out for the usable capacity, and you may have to tweak to increase usable capacity.

 

I would like to install a msata as a storage drive. Where is the msata slot and what do you have to do to get it recognized by the os?

 

Can anyone give me their opinion on this laptop compared to the ASUS Q501LA-BBI5T03? Is it worth an extra $175 for this one if I want to do a little photo/audio/light video editing? I don't play games. Just looking for something reasonably fast and nice looking. Thanks!

 

Okay, but what about caching? Could I make it use the mSATA for caching and just act like a hybrid drive?

 

No, there's no caching support. It's better to run off a larger SSD for best results.

 

Well, I got a 120gb, with the assumption that it should be plenty since you can just use the secondary hard drive to store most things. I have that setup in my desktop and it works just fine. Will 120gb not be enough for this laptop?

 

Mine turns Canon camera raws into jpegs about 1/2 as fast as my overclocked i5 2500K desktop which I guess is about right. The extra $175 also gets you a display port and 2 gig more of ram. Whichever one you buy you will need an extra $100 or so for a 240gig ssd.

 

I'm just wondering if I need to worry about copying over all the partitions if I'm going to leave the 1tb drive in as a secondary drive. How does the backup work? Will I be able to just clone the entire hard drive over to the smaller one and have that work?

 

If you don't download as much, then you should be fine with this setup.

 

Does anyone know which dvd rom caddy would fit the bracket of the original dvd rom? cuz I got an universal caddy from ebay and it would not fit the bracket of the rom.

 

Initial impressions:

I bought two of these notebooks. The components are different in each. The wireless adapter in one is Intel dual band n7260 and the other has Qualcomm Atheros (not dual band).

One has Hynix ram installed, the other has Kingston. The hard drives are also by different makers, one has a a Toshiba the other uses a Samsung drive.

So far, I have found that the Bluetooth on the Intel N-7260 will not work. It pairs, connects, and then in 5 seconds drops the connection. The Qualcomm equipped notebook has a slick bluetooth utility that opens and works reliably. I have tried the latest drivers from both Asus and Intel, they behave the identically. I didn't check bluetooth out before updating to 8.1, so it could be an issue with the adapter and 8.1, I don't know. I read about others having a Bluetooth problem with the N-7260. Intel says to install the Bluetooth drivers first, when updating drivers. That's how I did it.

These are true fingerprint magnets. They look like hell in about two minutes. I don't like it, but I can live with it. The keyboard is hard to see at times. I wish the keys were black. The keyboard is taking me a while to adapt to. The arrow key layout is weird, and the "Delete" key is small and in a place that I am not used to. I know it has been mentioned before, but the DVD drive does not close easily. It takes a few times for it to lock back into closed position. Then there is the BIOS:confused2: The boot menu is a mystery. I had to go online to figure out how to boot to the DVD drive and a bootable USB drive. It sure as heck ain't intuitive. It is the most bare bones BIOS I have ever come across. The manual, what there is of it, is not very complete, not muich better than a getting started guide.

A really nice display. Lots of connectivity with three USB3 ports, HDMI, Memory card reader, Ethernet port, bluetooth (If it worked).

at this point I'm still finding my way around Windows 8.1. I have used Windows 7 forever. My girlfriend is using Windows 7 classic shell on her 8.1 machine, and she really likes it.

I'll spend some more time with this notebook and see what I think of it in a week or so.

 

Anyone have installed windows 7 on this laptop ? If so, which drivers have used also the touchscreen still works on windows 7 ?

 

I just bought Asus Q550LF-BBI7T07 and found it very good.

However, I cannot upgrade to Windows 8.1 from the store.
I google the solutions but still no one can work. I already tried to refresh the computer through recovery. Install all updates. I even disable the windows defender. It still shows error 0×80240031. It seems no way to get it update to Windows 8.1. Any suggestion? Many thanks!

 

So just picked up this laptop and was hoping to swap an SSD in place of the crappy internal HDD it comes with.

Anyone have the proper steps to swapping this out? Is creating a recovery USB my best option? I'm migrating to a 240GB Crucial m500 SSD.

 

I also have the same exact SSD, what I did was I cloned the HDD drive with Acronis True Image 2014 to the SSD, it works great and no problems

 

I used Aconis also and got all of the partitions reproduced. Remember, you have to put the new ssd in the laptop and the original drive in the usb dock because of the UEFI bios.

 

anyone knows a good dvd hard drive caddy that fits the original dvd bracket?

 

It's difficult if the stock one was custom made.

 

*edit
it does work!
i just got done upadating all my hardware drivers after i installed win7ultimate, and the touchscreen works!

 

did you need to do anything special? or did you just use a Win 7 install DVD and booted up with it? also, any issues regarding drivers for windows 7? my laptop should be arriving today and i would love to be able to install windows 7 on it.

 

bios, security tab, secure boot menu, disable boot control
boot tab, launch csm enable, disable launce pxe oprom for an MBR install, or enable it for UEFI install
boot tab, set DVD rom or USB device as boot option 1
advanced tab, usb config, enable legacy, disable XHCI otherwise USB ports won't work

for UEFI follow this guide (do either DVD or USB install, i did DVD) How to install Windows 7 in UEFI Mode with a USB - Windows 7 Help Forums

drivers
Asus Q550LF Drivers Download for Windows 7, 8, XP, Vista

for the PCI data acquisition drivers, download the "Intel® Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Drivers" for windows 8.1 from asus under the "others" tab
http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=Q550LF&os=8

 

you are awesome, thank you for this !! did you make a recovery backup of the windows 8 install that came when you turned on the laptop? or did you fully wipe and format? how is the touch screen reacting so far? any glitching or sluggishness?

i remember seeing an app that could pull your windows 8 key for future use. ill probably be doing that before formatting to win 7. ill be using a windows dvd to install also, so your guide will be perfect for me. im planning to replace the primary hd with an SSD and getting a hdd caddy to use the 1tb hdd as storage space.

 

i didn't care at all about windows 8, so i just fully wiped and created new partitions as NTFS

touchscreen seems fine so far i use it more than my mouse

 

Thanks for your report..

On a side note, have anyone been able to install a regular mSata as primary drive ? I'm having a hard time trying.. on BIOS it's detected, Windows 8 installer doesn't detect it, but OS X it does... So what the hell is wrong with Windows !

 

Hey guys -

I installed an msata SSD and cloned my HDD drive over. Everything works great (needed to fix the boot order but otherwise was pretty easy).

However, when I try to update to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8, I get an error. Did anyone else have this problem?

 

which BIOS Version you have ? I'm having a lot of trouble trying to do a clean install on the mSata.

 

What error message do you get?

 

oxc1900101 - 0x20017

error message is "a required device is not connected"

Per advice from this thread, I updated the BIOS to the most recent version. I cloned the HDD to the SDD using Ease US Todo Backup, which was seamless. I needed to us another program to update the boot order to get it to boot from the SSD (windows boot manager only wanted to boot from the HDD and I couldn't seem to change it in the BIOS). After I did that, everything worked great.

Downloaded all windows updates and Windows 8 seems to work.

I just haven't been able to update to Windows 8.1. The laptop didn't come it any sort of Windows 8 disk, and it was wiped in way so that I couldn't create a recovery disk, so I decided to just clone rather than do a clean install.

there are a number of threads at microsoft about this, like this one:

Error 0xC1900101 – 0x20017 when installing Windows 8.1 - Microsoft Community

I found another thread that said I should try reformating the HDD so there are no windows files on it, which I did, but that didn't help.

The threads suggest that there may be a driver issue, and ultimately say that if you can't figure it out you need to do a reset or refresh install of windows 8 and try again. I may be fine doing that because the computer is new and I don't have many files on here, but I thought i should check with you guys to see if anyone else had this issue. I'm also a little hesitant to do anything drastic as I don't have recovery media and not sure what I'd do if i get a permanent BSOD.

 

Once I get windows 7 installed.. if I ever wanted to finally update back up to windows 8, will having my product key enable me to do so with a legit download and install.. or even a windows 8 dvd/iso ?

I was able to use a program to extract my legit key and have it saved for future use.

Also, I plan to soon swap out my main drive for an SSD and put the 1tb HDD into an opti-bay caddy. This wouldnt cause any issues with a future windows 8 install right?

 

delete, forgot to quote a response

 

also.. is there a particular reason why we have to install windows 7 using this method? for the future, if i ever wanted to format my laptop and do a clean install again of windows 7, do i have to do this process the exact same way?

 

it's because the laptop comes with windows 8 installed, which uses a GPT format instead of NTFS, and also this UEFI security stuff.
that is why you have to disable the UEFI security, enable legacy stuff to get USB working and also DVD as a boot option, etc etc

once they changes are made and you install 7.....the changes are already....made
so you can re-install 7 over and over all you want without doing all those steps

 

very good info! i got most of the bios stuff done but this particular step "boot tab, set DVD rom as boot option 1" .... i went into the boot tab and i did not see an option to set DVD Rom as boot option 1.. could it possibly be somewhere else?

 

Hi!

I just bought the asus q550lf form best buy and I have a serious problem. Any time I unplugged the Ethernet cable or any USB on the left side the screen turns off and I have to press fn+f7 twice to wake the computer. Anybody has the same problem?
Thanks

 

How did you do it? I have a problem with the usb and it may help. My problem is that the screen goes off when I unplugged anything from the usb on the left side.

 

weird.. after a few reboots and power offs, i finally got the option to show up and hitting Esc actually gave me a boot menu option. im loading up the win7 dvd as we speak. ive decided that due to some work apps that i need, i will not have any use for windows 8 anytime soon.. so i will be fully formatting the drive. will report back after it is all done and drivers are installed. thanks again

 

Ok so I follow every step and when i get to this part:

14) Click "New"
15) It should come up with your disk size and hit apply.
16) A prompt will up asking you if you will allow windows to create system partitions, click OK. It should create another 2 along with your primary partition.

I do not get 3 partitions total. It only creates 1 new partition that is labeled "Disk 0 Partition 1: System Reserved" at 100mb

I tried to continue anyway with the install, it took a very long time to get to 8% and it gave me an error saying it was missing some files.

Any ideas?