G50V-A2 -- BD reads incredibly slow, 9 hour game install

Took 9 hours to install the game that came with the PC, this is common of all optical media I've tried in this PC. Does anyone know if there are any updated drivers? I've been unable to locate any at asus.com

Also, CoD4 is so jerky as to be unplayable on any setting. Other games are jerky, but not as bad. When i spent this kind of money on a laptop I as expecting something that would outperform my old, mediocre desktop.

 

My A2 installed Alone in the Dark right out of the box in roughly 10mins or so. I think there is something faulty going on. Sorry I can't be more specific, but mine does not have this problem at all, the only thing I've changed is the video card drivers to 177.79.

 

Your drive sounds borked. I installed Bioshock on the same machine with the stock driver in about 10 minutes (under Raid 0). Did you reinstall the OS and not install the driver?

However, I did also install Portal from the disc and it was a faulty install, leading to incredible game hangs (though now I'm not sure that wasn't related to my other problems). I reinstalled it directly from steam and the problem went away (this could also be a problem with disc versions of HL2.exe I hear), rather than a possible read error.

By the way, just to save you some pain, Alone in the Dark is a horrible game. It had incredible potential and some great ideas, all of which were thrown away to unspeakably bad gameplay and control. No, really, in 3rd person, it's like driving a car with your feet while facing the wrong way and in first person, Carnby feels like he's been sucking down Valium for the last 3 hours. Unless the game is super patched to change everything about the controls, I say save yourself the pain.

 

I agree with Alarien's post immensely, the game is terrible. It seems, it feels, it even can play like it could be so cool. But it just fails so hard. I still haven't finished it and probably wont consider my free time valuable enough for it for a very long time.

But your 9 hour install is definitely a sign of something being wrong.

 

I suspect the optical drive is bad. Should be an easy replacement, if you convince ASUS service to send you the new drive in advance.

To make sure, before you go through the pain of RMA, you could first remove the device from the Device Manager and let Windows install it again; and next, a full Windows recovery (preferably via the clean install route, see the Info BoothFAQ for details). Backup your data first.