New G71v-Q1 Owner with problems already

I just got my G71v-Q1 yesterday. Picked it up from the post office Dec9th; it was ordered from newegg Nov 18th, and arrived here on my island Nov28th. I was so happy to see the box. I opened it up, and it was full or packing foam peanuts and another box albeit with tamper seals on it. I open up that box to find another box. This one had pretty graphics on it, and a handle. It's very nice that Asus bundled in a good sturdy backpack for it, and a cool razor copperhead lazer mouse.

Anyhow, I pull it out, stick in the battery, and plug in the power. Initial power up took a long time, something like 15 minutes or so to get through whatever setup and all. After that first setup, the rest of the time it would be up in about 30 secs - very very nice compared to my old w2pb. Build quality is awesome. Without the battery, the laptop felt oddly light but sturdy. With the battery, it felt much more solid. The feel of the plastic is nice and smooth like a freshly waxed car. It looks like asus just used their older lamboghini laptops and put a rog symbol to replace the bull shield. The design of the lines, and the front leds were definitely Lamborghini inspired.
Performance wise, it was smooth. Not sure if it's the quad core, the 64-bit os, or the 9700m gt, but seems like tasks that go on in the background are unnoticable. Vista's Welcome Center shows scores of 5.9 across the board except for 3d game performace with a 5.6 and a disk performance of 5.3.

5.3? I thought this thing had 2 disks in a striped raid. Well...
It came pre-configured with the disks in "enhanced" mode, not sure what that means but raid was not active at all... not 0 or 1. So I dig through the manual how to get into the bios etc to get raid running. So I do; change "enhanced" mode to raid, restart and press ctrl-I to get to the raid utility. ok, set and done, disks are wiped, pull out the recovery dvd(s) and start bringing the system back up. After about 2 hours, 3 disks, and several automated restarts, it shuts down completely on its own.

This is where my problem began. Upon powering up, the audio goes haywire disastrously. The speakers (all 4 of them) emit a blaring static noise, like a car alarm but with wailing static instead of a wailing siren. the system continues to boot up through this noise, and operates as if nothing was wrong. I can open up the device driver to disable the audio driver and it stops. If I re-enable it, everything is fine again. Audio works perfectly. I do a soft restart, and it still works right. It's only when I do a hard shut down (power down completely), and then start, that the noise comes back. Is anyone else having this problem with their g71 or g50? Is it the raid0 device or is it the audio?

Well... the disk performance from the welcome center jumped up to 5.9 from a 5.3. Raid is definitely performing as it should. I haven't downloaded any benchmarks yet, so that windows thing is the only thing I have to show.

But this audio problem...

 

I've not had any audio problems with mine. I had to do a complete re-install because of a bad HDD.

I don't believe I saw any updated Audio Drivers on the Asus Website, I did however notice a new BIOS. It indicates that it fixes lockups on the QX9300 at certain temps, but it is possible there may be other things fixed. Just a thought. I'm currently running Bios 212

 

Are there any options in the BIOS regarding onboard audio?

 

Bad HDD? newegg emailed me saying ASUS was telling them something was wrong with the hdd also, and asked me to release my contact information to Asus so they can get in touch with me. They haven't, and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with my hdd.

Yeah, first thing I tried was update the bios. The original version that shipped on the laptop was 209T04. Which is odd because none of the other bios versions on asus' download site is numbered that way. So I've got version 212 now, and same problem. Only thing in the bios option that directly affects the audio is a "security" feature that disables it completely. No help there.

But... it's usually the most obvious things that get us, isn't it? Well, as I was disabling and reenabling the sound driver under device manager for the umpteenth time, it hit me.... There are actually two sound devices, one for hdmi, one for the speaker/phone jacks. I had been disabling the one for the speaker/phone jacks, and never bothered to look at the other one. When I did, I noticed that both devices had the same exact driver installed for them. The basic one provided by MICROSOFT. So I stuck in the driver disk, and low and behold, it shows the audio driver isn't installed. Click the checkmark, 10 minutes later, problem solved.

Simple thing right under our noses... leave it to microsoft to have their generic "WHQL certified" drivers take precedence over a manufacturer's when re-installing from a recovery disk. So I'm happy again. Raid striping, good sound and video, no hickups. time to install all the other goodies.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.

 

Hi Im a lucky owner of G71v from Poland. From the very beggining have prablem with this laptop couse system was crashes many time a day. Ive try to find problem and i cant do it. Ive knew that problem was in driver so when i cant solve it Ive just reinstal system to a Win x64. Now everything is perfect. Only dont have a hotkeys with FN key. So if someone knew about ATK Hotkeys driver working with Win x64 please let me know where i can find them.
Sorry for poor english.
regards
Waldek

 

Autoplay the drivers disk. the autoplay will show you what drivers/utilities are installed or not and check mark the ones you want. Select All if you don't know what does what.

 

hard disks arent possible to set in raid 0 I think

 

Why are the hard disks not possible to set in raid 0?

 

The motherboard must be able to support RAID and in the G71G's case, it's not supported, hence RAID-0 is not available.

 

Ya just to verify this, David discovered that in another thread, the controller is an ICH10 instead of an ICH10R, thus lacking RAID capability. It's a shame

 

That IS a shame. I dont' know what my southbridge is, but I've got it setup. That's why I had to ask why it wasn't possible.

 

" But... it's usually the most obvious things that get us, isn't it? Well, as I was disabling and reenabling the sound driver under device manager for the umpteenth time, it hit me.... There are actually two sound devices, one for hdmi, one for the speaker/phone jacks. I had been disabling the one for the speaker/phone jacks, and never bothered to look at the other one. When I did, I noticed that both devices had the same exact driver installed for them. The basic one provided by MICROSOFT. So I stuck in the driver disk, and low and behold, it shows the audio driver isn't installed. Click the checkmark, 10 minutes later, problem solved.

Simple thing right under our noses... leave it to microsoft to have their generic "WHQL certified" drivers take precedence over a manufacturer's when re-installing from a recovery disk. So I'm happy again. Raid striping, good sound and video, no hickups. time to install all the other goodies.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.[/QUOTE] "


Hi Caldorosso!!

Can you help me with that "noise" problem?
Please send me a PM!

Thank you so much for your attention.

Cheers!