Asus G73JW Owners' Lounge

[Nocturnalis]

Hi guys, it's my first post here.

To start with: my specs: G73jw, i7, fullHD
My general impressions after 2 weeks:

The laptop is absolutely great. Wonderfull screen (damn, the pixels are a bit too small though), Splendid Mode is great; It's a definite merit.
Sound - really suprised me, it's LOUD, with a noticeable bass! Wonderful! no cracking noises so far.
Keyboard is great - very quiet. Touchpad's superb too, big, with multitouch.
Performance is very good as well, i can play all my games in Full HD maxed-out.

now the questions part:

- i've installed win7 x64 - clean; then installed all the stuff asus put on their cd - now i have 1.5GB of ram used just after boot. normal? Doesn't seem so.

- Had nVidia 259 drivers, now have 260; Still - sometimes games freeze for a second or two. Example: i launch Left 4 Dead 2 - I can play for few minutes, then i get a 10sec slideshow, then everything gets back to normal. Did you experience this?

- The laptop isn't very loud. It cools down very quickly. I dont mind the noise during games - I dont hear it anyway. What disturbs me is the noise during office work. First of all, i have ca. 43C (111F) on CPU and 39C(102F) on GPU now (and most of the time).
Are these high temperatures? While playing a game I get 70C on GPU MAX (after 1 hour of GTA4).

The problem is that the laptop NEVER stops cooling itself. It's on the lowest possible fan speed (i guess) but still - it's running. The laptop is shaking ;-/ this is annoying.

Can you determine the temperatures the fan starts working? i dont mind few C more here and there ...

That is normal. If you want to free up some rm and get a gaming performance boost, go into your services under administrative tools in the control panel and turn off "superfetch" it keeps the most used progams in memory and preicts the next few programs that you will use for faster loading. It hogs up memory in the long run, and turning it off gives a noticeable boost to performance in gaming as it allows more free memory for swap usage and loading during high intensity usage.

does any one has random lock ups?
I have recently getting a few lock ups, sometimes during playing music and during using google chrome...

this is currently the worst issue i am having

Yes, multiple people have this issue and I am one. It has me pulling my hair out. My wifes 250 dollar laptop NEVER freezes up, and yet my 1700 dollar monster does it sometimes 3 times a day. Never when I am gaming, just when I am not hardly doing anything but surfing the net or just idling....

This needs fixed BAD

[mlb426]

hello everyone. Great thread here. I have been searching for a gaming laptop for a few weeks and have decided on the G73jw-xr1. The response overall seems to be very positive.

This being said, I am trying to decide where to buy it from. Using the first post from this thread I called up xotic and powernotebooks.com today. Gentech no longer has the xr1 in stock.

Any experience with either xotic or powernotebooks? Both vendors seemed very knowledgeable on the phone and the price is exactly the same.

Thanks

[wumpussor]

Thanks for the replies.

if i install the profile, will it be "available" under the splendid mode button? i find this switch very useful.

Where exactly is the superfetch control?


Basically i am new to Asus, it's my first laptop from them. Do you have some general tips? When i first inserted the CD (with driver) i had no idea, what was crucial, and what wasn't worth a penny (like WIRELESS CONSOLE etc.). I'd like to know which process is resposinble for what (i appreciate the OSD, keyboard controll etc.)

I have some more questions:
- MSI AFTERBURNER - have anyone of you tried using it? Can I OC my card? Or ever - UNDERclock, so that the fans dont spin all the time..

- mentioned fans: i dont like them spinning all the time!! In the past 2 weeks they turned off only a couple of times. Is this the 'super cooling' by asus?

I dont if it's only my model, or a general issue, but when the fans DO work - i can feel them! Not a big deal, but definitely the shaking is noticeable!!

Please help

[fexnok]

I'm curious if you have different hardware or a different driver installed. Perhaps the drive is fickle and will read only specific brands of cards. I've tried a couple of 8GB cards without success. Any additional info is very helpful.

Sounds weird. Mine is a Transcend SDHC CLASS 6 16GB. Driver is Microsoft 6.1.7600.16385, detected as SD card. Do you need anything else?

[WorldwoWires]

Sounds weird. Mine is a Transcend SDHC CLASS 6 16GB. Driver is Microsoft 6.1.7600.16385, detected as SD card. Do you need anything else?

I see the MS driver under disk drives that shows SD Card. The Realtek PCIE CardReader driver 6.1.7600.54 is under Memory technology driver. Very weird indeed... I'll try again to get it to read the 8GB card I have. Thank you for the info. One more question, is your SDHC card NTFS or FAT32 formatted?

[Abula]

I have no issues with the SD reader, just tested with 8GB SD Transcend.

[TheLoneRaven]

After ASUS's horrific support and two successive RMA's of G73JW's, one due to a faulty motherboard and one due to the charger actually MELTING, I've unfortunately have moved on to the Sager NP8760. The G73JW was a nice laptop for the few days I actually got to enjoy it

I'm gonna miss that nice display...haha

[rcjonessnp175]

Talk about some bad luck

[misterzero]

Just got my xa1 all set up and stuff!
So far so good, ran 3dmark06 & got 13,270 with a little overclocking. Had my GPU temps at 70c while playing Crysis for an hour on max res + all high. Definitely my best laptop thus far, previous one was a XPS M1730 and that thing was huge compared to this Asus and temps are definitely cooler than the 8800M GTX sli.
Hopefully I won't encounter any problems

EDIT: What are the differences in power modes for reglar High Performance and power4gear High Performance?
Thanks in advance!

EDIT2: I looked at my 3dmark06 results and looked at my RAM and i saw 4 modules of 2048 MB Hyundai Electronics 9 @ 667 MHz
This is an Asus G73JW-XA1 and it says on the box that it should have 1333Mhz, why is it at 667? Are they suppose to double up and have 2 modules with 1333Mhz each?

[WorldwoWires]

I have no issues with the SD reader, just tested with 8GB SD Transcend.

Interesting, another Transcend card. The one I have is an 8GB PNY SDHC. Not sure what the deal is. I'm sure with the assistance of the readers I'll get to the bottom of it. Thank you for your input.