Q550LF questions

Hello everyone, new asus q550lf owner here. bought it at auction dirt cheap.

now, i've been a desktop enthusiast for over 20 years. First time i ever owned a laptop.

I have a few questions about this q550lf. Now i use this laptop mainly for gaming on the go.

1) the current motherboard has a intel i7 4500u + nvidia 745m built in. Are there any other motherboards from other asus models that could fit this laptop while at the same time being an upgrade?
so say if i wanted to upgrade to a quad i7 with a better graphics card, is there a motherboard from any other asus laptop that would fit in mine without major modifications?

2) keyboard: the current keyboard is silver with WHITE backlight. whoever thought of this...........sigh..... needless to say i cannot see anything in daylight when backlight is turned on.
is there a keyboard with different key color, or different backlight color that i could replace?

3) this is a FYI for anyone who has a Q550lf: DO NOT UPDATE BIOS to version 215. i spent an entire afternoon going back to version 214 and reinstalling everything. basically version 215 kills the nvidia 745m card.

 

1) As far as I can tell: No. But this is as far as a quick search has lead, so this is still fairly nebulous.

2) There's no simple and practical way to do this. The LEDs are the color they are unless physically modified/swapped out. I don't believe there is a different keyboard available touting an alternative color to the LEDs.

3) Can you elaborate? (Would really appreciate it.) I'm interested to know what's up with that version.

 

Bios version 215 is bugged. It makes it so that the nvidia gt 745m video card is not functioning after installing windows. I spent the whole day figuring why my games were using intel hd4400 instead of nvidia.
So i checked device manager and saw a yellow caution on nvidia. No matter what drivr i used i couldnt get it working
So i had to boot into fail safe mode because asus flash on bios does not let you downgrade an older bios.
I noticed the only thing i changed before the nvidia card crapping out was to update bios to 215
Once i downgraded i had to reinstall windows 10 and voila i was good to go
But holy crap did i sweat my arse off to figure things out. and im pretty old school with computers. I go back into the xt dos era.

 

Ah, Windows 10... That's interesting. Thanks for that! Hopefully this helps other users.

 

Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 all three didnt work. And yes i tried all 3 god bless ssd for makin it quick.
The issue i think was not OS related, the video card bios itself wasnt getting loaded.