Asus N73JQ Owners' Lounge

[BrodyBoy]

Whenever I'm considering a product/model/brand I haven't tried before, I read a bunch of reviews over on Newegg. Amazon reviews are good, too, but the Newegg crowd seems to include more system builders. I find their comments especially useful because they have lots of experience. (And they're less likely to give those silly misleading ratings, like giving a product one star because the shipper was slow. )

When it comes to HDD reviews, the two things I look for are: 1) those drives that lots of users, especially the system builders, use routinely because they find them so reliable...that's good ; and 2) those drives that seem to have a lot of DOA or early failure complaints mixed in the reviews....that's bad. (Makes me wonder about the manufacturer's quality control.)

[DragonglassTM]

Thanks for the advice Brody, I've looked on Newegg, quite similar to Amazon, for the Seagate, they complained that some crashed instantly, some DOA, or worked for 24hours and went bonkers. I couldn't find many reviews for the Hitachi, there are 5 great reviews on Amazon, all praising it for being quiet and speedy, and on Newegg, there were 2 good reviews and one bad one, something about it doesn't have a temperature sensor and his macbook fan had to blow at high speed. Wow, a lot of DOAs for Seagate... and I thought Seagate was great because that's what Asus put in. I think I'll go with the Hitachi, don't you think?

[DragonglassTM]

Whoa... suddenly there are 95 reviews for the Hitachi? Holly $%#!@ what went wrong with Amazon? Anyways, apparently, quite a few 500GB one's were defective or "slow shipping" and "bad packaging", not that many reviews for 750GB.... I'll just go with Hitachi I guess.

[BrodyBoy]

I wouldn't make any assumptions based on what any manufacturer uses....I think they just go with the lowest bidder. So I've seen virtually every brand show up in new machines. (My N73 came with Seagate , while the G74 came with WD. I really don't think computer manufacturers have any brand allegiance when it comes to components....just lowest bidder at any given time.)

The only DOA and early failure drives I've ever used were Seagate. (They were both 3.5" drives, not notebook.) That experience, of course, makes me more wary of Seagate personally, but I try to be objective and also realize that they are one of the really big drive manufacturers. Seems like it would be hard to stay in business and grow to that size if their products were mostly crap. So maybe I just had bad luck. (But still, I don't buy Seagate anymore! )

I had one notebook drive fail years ago, and that was an OEM Hitachi in a Sony laptop. But it was 2-3 years old, so I don't draw any conclusions from that one experience.

I think you should be okay with either one. Any early failure should be covered by warranty and be readily replaced by Amazon or Newegg (or whoever). And if you employ a good back-up routine, drive failure is mostly just an inconvenience, not a crisis anyway.

[DragonglassTM]

Awesome, thanks a lot man, I've noticed for external hard drives, WD seems to be awful... always having error messages pop up and crashing a lot. Seagate externals, for me, are great so that's why I thought that internal HDDs might be good too. But judging from the reviews, there seems to be a LOT of DOAs. So I'll got with Hitachi, it's cheaper anyway. I think WD internals are good though, that's the one I use for the computer I built. Then again, it's only been a few months so I'll just wait and see. But yeah, Hitachi it is then.

[Sn1g3l]

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Asus N73JF Bios flashed. Bricked.

I flashed my bios and it went wrong. I cancelled the service request in order to try DragonglassTM's suggestion and remove the cmos battery.

This did not help. BTW removing the keyboard was not enough! Pretty much had to disassemble the notebook, which took a few hours to figure out, since some of the screws are well hidden, but I finally managed it.



As I said removing the CMOS battery did not fix the issue. Any further suggestions before I send it back to service?

[Cary Ader]

Sn1g3l, sorry you found your way here only after a very unpleasant experience. Welcome!

I had one service experience with ASUS here in the USA and it was very good, very fast. I could have saved aggravation shipping my unit to them sooner, but being a tech, I thought I could figure it out myself. (Turned out to be a bad touchpad.)

Just get it to a certified ASUS repair center, relax, and enjoy it when it comes back. Hope to hear a happy report. Best of luck!

Nice picture, by the way!

[DragonglassTM]

Darn, Sn1g3l, I'm sorry that didn't work... it always worked for me when I crashed my BIOS after overclocking it too much, but that was for desktop. I really don't know anyway way to roll back the BIOS. Well, I don't know if it's possible to put your BIOS back into the laptop if you have the BIOS on a flash drive? And holly crap, how did you take your laptop apart? I wanted to do that!

[BrodyBoy]

When a computer is truly bricked....i.e., a corrupted BIOS prevents any type of boot from any type of device....I don't think I've ever heard of an end-user being able to resurrect it. The BIOS needs to be reset or replaced, and that's not a DIY procedure.

Cary gave great advice: send it in...and relax. It's frustrating, and it puts you out of commission for a bit, but it IS fixable.

Just out of curiosity, how were you doing the update? From EZFlash, from within windows, from a thumb drive? .....and at what point did it fail?

[Sn1g3l]

Thanks for the advice guys. I am going to send it back to the retailer monday probably. Depends on when the replacement back cover arrives. Fortunately I have a backup laptop. It's a Compaq presario that had a broken HDD and dead battery that I replaced. Not as good, but I can get by with it.

I flashed from the BIOS utility (EZFlash I think). I have done it once before and it went ok. The image was on the main harddisk partition in my profile root folder. This time I got a warning about a faulty header on the image. I was frustrated and it was late, so i stupidly just ignored it and went ahead with the flash. Everything seemed to go ok the old image erased and the new was written. Verification went ok as well. Then it went and rebooted and this is were it died completely.

Initially the battery recharge led was on but after removing battery and power cord, this turned off as well. After this the unit has been a complete brick. Absolutely nothing happens when you press the power button. No leds, no asus splash screen, no fan sounds.