G51 from best buy, new owner

Hey All,

Recently bought a G51 from best buy, for $999. Yesterday I got in the mail, and I had some games ready for it I haven't had a gaming computer since I was 14 yrs old (it was PS1 back then), so now i'm deployed and decided to get something to entertain me. I did a lot of research, and kind of narrowed it down to this ASUS and Sony VIOS at new egg... ASUS seemed to top it with the game card and the fact that Best Buy was willing to ship it to Asskrakistan. My other computer (lap top) is 5 yrs old, with 700ghz CPU, 512 ram, and nonexistent video card, so this is a big jump for me... Took it out of the box, and wow, i'm impressed... very high quality, with all these different lights, so it's pretty cool... i'm some what used to lit keyboard (since it's on our work computers), so i'm not gonna praise it (but it is nice). The first down i noticed with it is how heavy it is... wow, but I understand that it's a desktop replacement... still heavy, my other laptop is a lot less, and my ex's is like a feather compared to this one... So i was copying this DVD to the computer, and decided to check out the CPU turbo/xtreme turbo feature, cause you can "watch" the time "change"... well, the copy time did not change you know how it say's 5 minutes left, etc... nothing, it stayed where it was, and it did not go any faster with different modes... The first game I installed was Crysis war...something... (not good with game names, haven't played in a while), I set it up so that it automatically chose the settings for the game according to computer specs, and I used the "turbo" function.... game played very nicely, never got stock or anything!!! which is great! I'm not sure what type of quality I should be seeing, but i'm liking what i see (but, mind you, i'm coming from a crappy laptop). Only one thing, near my laptop I had a bag of cookies (about 5 inches away), and after 30 minutes it felt like the cookies were right out of the owen

ok, so now I have couple of questions (BTW there should be a FAQ for each system, I couldn't find some things). What is an efficient way to switch the power mode? Cause I always right click the battery icon, then go into power 4 gear, etc, so it's a multiple step process for me, i'm sure there should be an easier way for all of this. Hmm, so my laptop came with some CD's (like recovery Cd and 2 other one's), do I need to install anything from them? Should i try to update any of my drivers? I mean the computer works fine right now, but maybe there's something i'm missing. Also, when i was playing a the game, I wanted to go back to the desktop without turning off the game and I couldn't do that (back in the day I would press Ctrl alt esc and it would minimize the game). Also, on the right side of the game screen there is like a little line... like when there was some type of black box for text on the bottom of the screen, you can see that on the right, the box wouldn't go all the way and it would show the other back ground... but then some times it wouldn't do that.

well I think that's about it! I'm very happy with the system! I even bought a USB mouse which is white/black and nicely matches the laptop. I'm a little unhappy that it has all these "gaming" stickers all over the place, and the white cover has drawing of some sort (which from a far looks cool, but then closer up looks a little childish)... I'm just a little older, and would like to present a bit more proffesional image

 

to change battery modes, press the FN Button and the space bar. to minimize to the desktop, press alt+tab. and I'm not sure about your third question. this should probably be in the general asus section though.

 

So any word on what updates I should install? I heard some people saying that some will mess the system up.

 

I'm not sure how you're copying the DVD to the computer but you're probably limited on transfer speed, so the CPU is more than fast enough and you won't notice a difference. If your copy time is less than 15 min or so, I'd say this is very likely the case. If you're recoding the DVD (shrinking it or changing formats to, say divx or wmv), the turbo mode could help quite a bit.