Asus G53SW Owners' Lounge

It's pretty normal, under full load for me my gpu hits about 80C. Then can drop to about 38-45C Idle. So nothing to worry about.

 

Thx for the rep
anyways, how to update the nvidia driver? it keeps saying "The Graphics Driver Could Not Find Compatible Graphics Hardware"

 

I'm thinking about buying an ASUSG53, but I'm not sure if I should buy the G53SW or go with the G53SX.
My main concern is that a hell lot of people is giving lousy reviews to the G53SW on NewEgg (and in Amazon), stating that it comes defective out of the box.
As I live outside of the US, making a return would be quite troublesome, and don't want to argue with the customer service.
So I need advise regarding this. Should I go with the SX in NewEgg or with the SW? Is there any website that sells the G53SW and don't have a defective stock?

 

yeah, don't buy from Newegg period lol. I got mine from gentechpc.com

I've had a few problems here n there, but only noob problems lol, like downloading drivers n what not. Other than that, my SW runs great.

 

I've been thinking of upgrading my wireless card, but am unsure if this will be a worthy upgrade, or what I would upgrade it to. Do you guys have any suggestions? Also, are there any tutorials/videos that show how to upgrade it? I've never done this type of upgrade, so I am unsure where to start.

 

If you wish to keep the bluetooth, go with the intel 6230. It seems to be the one for most people to go with. I just ordered one and it should be arriving here soon. I did some searching for videos and can't seem to find any. I will see if I can make one when I change mine, if not I'll at least see if I can take some pics as I do the change out for you. Though it's not too hard, the hardest part is taking the bottom off, the look for a green card that has 2 wires attached to it. should be on the left hand side when you looking at the bottom of the laptop. Carefully unscrew the screw/s and place them somewhere you won't lose them, then pull the old card out, carefully unplug the 2 wires and then plug them into the new card, insert the new card into the slot. I don't think the wires need to be plugged into a particular way. They are only antennas. Make sure you uninstall the original wifi drivers and bluetooth drivers before swapping cards. Then put your laptop back together, boot it up and install the new wireless drivers. Again I'll see if I can post some pics once I get mine and put it in if you need them. Hope this helps.

 

So, this is the card your talking about?

Amazon.com: 6230 IEEE 802.11n (draft) Bluetooth 3.0 - Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Combo Adapter: MP3 Players & Accessories

Also, since the stock card already has built in Bluetooth, the upgrade would have to improve my wireless to be worth while. Will this give me more range? Faster speed? I have 15 Megabits at home, and at school, it's probably 50 or so. Will I see improvements? Let me know if you notice big improvements when you upgrade. It seems like a fairly cheap and easy upgrade.

Edit: Some pictures, or a video would be awesome. Probably pictures would be fine, and that would probably help a lot. Thanks in advance if you do.

 

Dont think you will see much difference, maybe a bit more stable but thats it.

 

I ordered: Amazon.com: 6230 IEEE 802.11n (draft) Bluetooth 3.0 - Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Combo Adapter: MP3 Players & Accessories

It shows a motherboard but it is the card. I just received it and am in the process of downloading the drivers for it. I will try to do pictures but no promises. I will let you know how much of a difference I get on wifi though. I mainly got it for the stability that these seem to show over the stock cards. So anything else for me would be a bonus. I'll keep you posted on the wifi.

 

Having the same issues here with temps. I get the same idle temps as you, and furmark brings me over 90 stock GPU. I can OC up to 750 mhz, crysis 2 and deus ex hr will get temps close to 90.
Any OC higher than that for me crashes any game, even before I hit high temps
I got it from Newegg, if I RMA with them I lose the $100 rebate. I may keep it a while, just not OC it beyond 750, possible RMA with ASUS down the line
Not too sure what to think, a temp thread with OC specs for this model would be nice

 

I have the same problem on G53SW-XN1 I got from Newegg. It happens mostly after I leave it running with the lid closed overnight and then start Firefox. OCCT, 3dmark etc work just fine. Firefox after a night of running - TDRs, corruption, bluescreens crap.

I don't feel like shipping it to Asus since I have a ton of trade secret company information on the HDDs and I need it for work. I'll probably end up buying replacement gfx card on eBay.

 

wow i can honestly say that in my scouring efforts you'd be the first poor soul to report this sort of behaviour specifically when the machine is at idle other than myself.

i don't close the lid myself when letting it sit, no sense in wearing out the hinge, and to my knowledge the keyboard backlighting stays on- not to mention i think the documentation indicates to never leave the lid down with the machine running somewhere. mostly remember it because i recall thinking it was a "derp" grade statement, without qualification of any kind such as what use situations it might be just fine(external display only, backlighting off maybe? or does the chassis HAVE to be open for ventilation? details not blanket statements would be great, but too much to ask apparently..).

anywho in my case it doesn't necessarily tdr each time artifacts appear. and it also doesn't seem tied to any particular application. yu also say 3d apps work fine, not so for me. using space marine as an example if artifacts have appeared and a tdr occurred, even if the artifacts seem to go away, the video company logos immediately after startup will have large blocks of corruption, the still screen with the games workshop logo will be partially garbled, and it will tdr+appcrash when it tries to load the 3d for the main menu. flash games through facebook will have color corruption, and/or bands of staticky garble through them, if they do not cause an instant tdr and turn into a green box, or lock the computer up. ie likes to rapidly recur tdrs in that state. chromes more stable but graphically wrong and dot artifacts will leave lines of their color if pages are scrolled slowly, plus a line of garble across the tab area right through to the minimize/close/etc buttons.
vlc may provide garbled video, perform very slowly, fill the video area with solid green, crash, or lockup. html5 fishbowl just runs like poo in this state(9fps 10 fish, occasional block glitching similar to video playback, dot artifact pattern on screen seems to appear faster).

scariest part is a restart won't fix it. only a full shutdown startup. could be bad state clear on soft off, could be a need to discharge some electrostatic buildup( i remember the power button issue being tracked down to a charge building up in the sticky material from the yellow tape under the touchpad. could be something similar elsewhere in theory), could be a tiny tiny hotspot, maybe vrm related causing it to overheat and misbehave when it is asked to sink too much current- ie in situation where the gpu is not using the power and it must be thrown away as heat(ie gpu 50mhz core/idle). no way to safely run the system(much less without voiding warranty) with it out of the chassis so i can spot check things like the vrms with an ir thermometer so no real way to test that.

i have a couple dozen page writeup of things i tried and still saw the same effect during. biggest problem at the moment is figuring out exactly how much to send with the machine to the asus techs, documentation wise. honestly i kind of want to send it all, say turn on and run idle for at least 3 days or until error occurs. there may not be a system event log entry relating to it but attempts to open the nvidia control panel with preview window every hour should enable checking when it has occured or not, this is what i've done, when it finally shows for you my guide to fixing this in one trip is replace mainboard+gpu, and for good measure here's a tube of icdiamond7 t.i.m. with instructions on application.

about the only situations i never saw artifacts occur where a 4 hour span of sitting in the bios, and during a 4hour, an ~8hour, and another 4 hour run of memtest86, memtest86+, and memtest 86+ respectively.

expressgate( few hours trying to figure out why it never seemed to acquire ip's via lan or wlan, saw it once while playing tetrinominoes).

backtrack5r1kde64 livedvd( had it handy. generic framebuffer xserver afaik, no nvidia software to be found, still kind of scratching my head on this one as system ram tests fine and i thought generic framebuffer used system ram not vram for screen drawing. guess it must page flip it out to the video device which stores it in its vram for writes tot he display or something. shrugs.)

windows 7 x86/32bit. unused ram due to os limits. gpu ram amount cuts into available allocation too which hurt. once during an install attempt, second try got through install, and driver scrounging. ugliness not long after.
appeared while in presp1, no updates yet, no flash installed yet. appeared next during a 20 minute window while the system sat at the desktop after sp1 installation finished while i was getting something to eat.

a dozen or more software arrangements for win7 x64. stock presp1 with driver disc drivers or installed from usb drive most current drivers, and selective hardware disabled manually, with or without a cooling pad, with or various performance modes/power management states.
similar arrangements working from a clean iso of win7 x64 home premium, and a school provided mak/vlk copy of win7 x64 pro. for those i also tried disabling hardware items selectively and never installing driver packages for certain things, trying both replacing old drivers with new and clean installs of specific driver packages.

seatools came back fine. twice, all standard tests.
i'm sorely tempted to try swapping the hdd out with another 500gb sata drive, possibly switching to the other bay, straight out removing some of the ram sticks, etc, but frankly given i cannot force the problem to happen except by leaving it on until it does i really would be best served by letting them have it where they can run a differential test between two complete units.

i figure either the power brick is unsteady at rare times, the gpu is, or the vram is, although i can't rule out some vrm on the mainboard feeding the gpu being twitchy. given three out of four culprits there are potential warranty voiders, and i do not have a spare power brick...

here's just hoping it gets back before december, holiday shipping after who knows how long with them..

sigh. nvidia really needs to come up with a bootable tool to check their gpu's out. maybe something headless based on linux with badram support so it's stable for testing even if the system ram is suspect(like memtest is..).

p.s. i blame typos in volume on still adapting to the new keyboard. unless i type "the" as "t he", that one seems to be they keyboard itself when i type too fast.

 

whats good everyone, quick ?, I'm playing Dirt3, and I have the 285.38 nVidia driver. It plays better than when i had the older drivers, but it still lags a little, i set almost all settings to low. I am getting the same type of effect people were getting when they would play GTA. I was wondering if "throttlestop" would fix this...? And where exactly do i download throttlestop for this laptop..? Any help will be appreciated, thanks...

 

Downloads | Tech|Inferno both 3.00 and 3.50 listed for download on that page. select and go.

based on readings here trying to dig up info, simply running throttlestop then closing it and trying your games can't hurt anything. might not fix it per se, but if its the same issue thats what we have to try :/

 

Theres already a 4.0 version in the throttlestop guide thread in hardware session.

 

Silly question, but does anyone know how to clean finger print marks from the G53SW?

I've never had a laptop that a mist of windex with microfiber didn't clean.

I'm worried about using a stronger cleaner and ruining the finish.

Read over 100 pages here and couldn't find the answer.

Thanks very much.

 

Have you tried mild soap and water? I personally would never use Windex laptops. It contains ammonia which damages the LCDs.

My G53 is full of prints, but quite honestly they don't bother me at all.

 

Exactly the same here. Restarts do not help. Everything goes to normal after full shutdown and start.

I have ran memtest multiple times and the system memory is good.

I suspect the artifacting is caused by video memory corruption. Any problems with GPU's memory controller would result in flickering not static corruption. You can see it happens in pattern of square tiles which suggests certain pages of video memory become corrupted. (Modern graphic cards use tiling video memory mappings to map square or rectangular image tiles into linear pages of memory to keep memory accesses localized for better caching and less DRAM page switching). When memory corruption happens on textures or displayed image it is annoying but it does not cause problems for the GPU. When DMA buffers or shaders in memory get corrupted it causes GPU to hang and triggers TDR.

edit: I just bought replacement card on eBay. I'll let you know if it helped after I replace it. Along the way I will repaste the CPU and replace the Wifi/BT combo with Intel 6230.

edit: I just ran OCCT 3 video memory test. 28790 errors. damn.

 

Just wanted to report back on my BSOD issues and speaker issues. I RMA'd and ASUS repaired the laptop the same day it was received and shipped that same day too. No more speaker issues nor anything else although they forgot to put back the screw that holds the mouse pad down -_-. Anyways, the BSOD issues was improper RAM placement. I wasn't placing the two G.Skill ram sticks in matching coordinating slots. I have yet to see any issues now.

Still have the throttle issue though, so I am going to check out the throttle stop 4.0 thread that was mentioned.

 

yeah occts memory test reports huge numbers for me as well. not sure what to make of that, but in my delvings into the f@h users who were looking for a gpu memory test i understand occt's gpu memtest may be to blame across the board.

found a utility called memtestcl and another called memtestg80. one requires compilation, the other is available as a precompiled exe from slimtk.org(requires registration). neither tests all the video ram, but rather a 192mb chunk. uses the same general methodology of testing as memtest86/memtest86+ but in the case of the precompiled exe runs in windows(adds the possibilities for driver/other system issues to cause error results, but a clean error free run is a clean error free run).

runing the windows commandline test during a no artifact session it takes about 5 minutes, and reports 0 errors. artifacts have appeared or a tdr event has happened- 7 digit error counts and it finishes in 30 seconds.

occt's gpu memtest still reports the same thing in both cases.

my original surmise was the better test only handles about 1/6th of the total vram, so depending on where the starting memory allocation pointer was in the 1.5gb of gddr5 vram it could be seeing a bad segment that is really bad, or only seeing a chunk of good vram. whereas occt's gpu memtest sees all 1.5gb at once, and thus fails all test on the affected area.

i'm assuming your case looks much like:


recent news however came in the thread right on these forums http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/618540-asus-g53sw-xn1-artifact-problem-screen.html

a 1 post user chiming in to another fellow, both seemingly with the same issue.

the firsttime poster indicated he resolved it by forcing the system to not use the lowest power state for the gpu with nvidia inspector.

given observations i've made that matches up exactly, as the machine exclusively explodes at low temperatures, and thus the low power state.

can game till ones eyes bleed, but idle at the desktop f@h gpu isn't enough to keep it from hitting its lowest power state, and my last set of test logs indicated it ran four hours and change like that, decided to drop power state on the gpu, then bam - corresponding display driver reset in event logs, gpu-z log shows speed stick low and temps fallof, and f@h gpu throws away 43000/50000 worth of progress on the work unit because of too many errors error.

funny thing is no hint of this problem in the year the jw/sw series has been out until now. i'm thinking maybe a production or assembly problem cropped up, or we'd have seen one heckuva lot more of this before now. could you imagine the asus rog f@h team putting up with this.

still waiting on a ride to a fedex location to ship it off myself. have the rma details. hopefully get it back with a stock stable gpu so i can trust it enough to start working through the cuda examples.

really motivated to try putting together a bootable nvidia gpu memtest equivalent to memtest86 presently, and i think that'll become my new pet project. micro linux distro with badram support and headless if my initial reading is correct on what it'd require.

one other inquiry. 203 is the latest bios listed on asus support for the 53sw. keep seeing people referencing a newer bios, and was reasoning the internals are pretty much the same save the mounting and breathing room for the cooling system between the 53sw and 73sw. anyone particularly handy on the bios side of things might be able to tell me just how different they are. already know there'll be differences for the different display panels needing entries, but the 73sw has updates to redress some fan speed issues, keyboard misses, and a couple other items that would be handy on the 53sw as well. already read through the aes-ni mod attempt some fellows have tried as well but the fellow doing the actual modding was unresponsive.

 

Okay, so my attempts to thwart throttling was futile. Could anyone give me some solid advice? I was reading most threads and it usually comes up with an answer of a bad GPU, or running throttle stop. I doubt I have a bad GPU because as soon as I plug the charger in, FPS soar. Running throttle stop doesn't work either so I am left scratching my head. Anyone have any insight?

 

"... because as soon as I plug the charger in, FPS soar"

Throttlestop is to prevent throttling while the charger is plugged in. I don't think there is a fix for throttling on battery power. There simply isn't enough juice to run everything at max power with the battery.

 

For those who have green and purple artifacts and continuous crashing, check out my posts in
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...0-asus-g53sw-xn1-artifact-problem-screen.html
Maybe that this will fix your problem ( it seems that it worked for me, I'm waiting to have a bigger uptime to confirm it )

 

Actually, I never tried soap and water since it I never take my computer near a sink. I do keep a small bottle of windex on the desk. LOL.

BTW, I only use the windex on the outside case. Never on the screen even though I didn't know of it's dangers.

 

Ah I see. I have no throttling issues with power plugged in lol. Thanks for the explanation, I understand why now.

 

i finally got my laptop , but i have a few question, apologizes if it seems noobish or have been answered before:

1) does the following void my warranty:
a) Installing the second hard disk
b) Upgrading the wireless card
c) Keyboard mod involving changing the color

2) my laptop came with windows 7 home without service pack installed. can i back up my windows 7 activation (using ABR) and then do a fresh installed windows 7 SP1 (Service pack 1 slipstream) and then recover the Activation?

3) Last, i have noticed all of my port are tight, i.e. when i plug in my usb, i have apply a little force to push it in. its same is for the audio jack, power
jack. Is this normal?

Thanks in advance and again sorry it these have been answered before or seem noobish

 

1 - You are fine, when you send it in for warranty though, just return the laptop back to stock(like remove all the extras you added and place back the ones that came with the laptop).

2 - Same as above

3 - I think they need to be "broke in". I experience the same thing and after a while they felt normal.

 

Yes, the corruption on screen looks the same here.

This low power state observation makes a lot of sense. It is very much possible that we have unlucky bad GPUs or memory chips on the board that do not underclock/undervolt well so switching to lowest power state messes up something in the GPU or memory chip and everything goes to hell from there.
Is there any way to completely disable this low power state? Maybe there is some driver registry setting to do it permanently?

 

I just cracked open my new G53SW-NX1 Purchased from Newegg. It's flawless. Fired right up and I'm doing a clean Win7 install as I write this. The Packaging and handling was great from Newegg and UPS. I was pretty worried like others after all the research.

I can't believe I got this much laptop for $800 bones after the rebate. Soon after I ordered the laptop on Newegg last Friday Night late... it went out of stock and still is out of stock on Newegg the last time I checked.

Anyway... looking forward to checking this baby out tonight and tweaking it all out with a clean install.

mg

 

hm just ran a test with nvidia inspector forcing the 50mhz core state to the same settings as the 202mhz state. ran a f@h gpu session. took a nap. log indicates it stayed at 675mhz state this time, but still came back to the same artifact mess. highest recorded temp for the session was 83C. sigh. i could understand problems with state switching, or clocking gddr5 with a twitchy chip too low, but a consistent 98% ish gpu 16-25%vram load for a couple hours without going into furmark temp ranges is rediculous.

eagerly awaiting word on your results to compare.

p.s. i imagine theres a way to mod it permanently or at least until new drivers are installed. used to be a powermizer setting set, but now it seems to be driver regulated in another way. i'll see if i can dig it up and repost if you don't want to try nvidia inspector as a startup task( i don't, too little good documentation in english).

oh yeah. might seem stupid given what i've read but has anyone with one of these run the occt gpu memory test without errors?

 

Same here. It was an awesome deal for those of us who got in on it. I have had the machine for over 2 weeks and have not had the power button issue that many people reported. I have had a random video issue that I have not yet tracked down. Hopefully it is not serious.

 

Sorry no pictures, but it was a fairly easy upgrade. I ended up re-installing windows for a fresh install. Make sure you uninstall your current wifi and bluetooth drivers before changing the card. My school has wireless-g and I ave noticed stronger reception, and even a little better speed. No benchmarks to prove wireless speed, but it does seem a little faster. It's the range and stability I've noticed that has taken an improvement. Well worth the $25 I payed for it. I'll know when I go home this weekend how much better it is as I have a dual-band router there. All in all a good buy. I also upgraded to 14GB of ram (really didn't feel like pulling my laptop apart to get to that last 2G stick.) Noticed a performance upgrade there as well. (considering I sold off my minecraft server and just turned my laptop into a personal server.) So yeah. All in all, I think I'll be good for awhile now.

 

Yeah, I might upgrade then, since it seems easy, and cheap. Also, I've been thinking about getting an SSD, but they are very expensive. I saw this one on newegg, and it seemed like a good deal.

Newegg.com - OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

it ends up being 124.99 after the mail in rebate, so it's close to a dollar per GB for a SATA III Drive. No sure if I should bite, or wait till they are inevitably cheaper/more reliable.

Edit: Also seems like lot's of people have problems, but that seems to be the case with all the SSD's I check out. If I get an SSD, I'd like it to last the lifespan of my computer, which I want to be 3 - 5 years. Are SSD's known to fail after a year, or two?

 

My card was getting artifacts before I apply my PL0 overclock and I just ran OCCT vram test several times without errors (never tried it with stock clocks but I don't think that it will make a difference since the GPU run at PL2 during this task)

May be that I'm just lucky for now but before I was getting theses artifacts almost every 2 days. It applied my "fix" for two weeks:
11 days uptime (no problem) -> reboot (updates, not a crash) -> 3 days uptime (now)
So far so good... But only the time will tell if it is really stable.

 

Seems most of the problems are SATA III drives. I've had my Samsung one since the middle of July and so far have had no problems. I've even reinstalled windows multiple times. Results may vary I suppose. But once you get an SSD you never really want to go back. I love the speed of it and have even noticed a little bit better battery life (probably 15-30 mins extra). Just do your research before buying. I did research on mine and asked around, including on this very forum. The samsung was a good pick for me.

 

Hey guys havent been in these forums for a while and im sure my question has already been answered BUT does the G53 support 2TB hard drives both through hardware and also physical space dimensions int he drive bay?

 

Umm there is 2TB 2.5" hard drive already? I can force a 1TB scorpio blue 12.7mm into the G53SW though.

 

Actually I dont know if there is now. A few minutes ago while typing the questions I thought the external portable drive I had was a 2TB. Just now I realized its a 1TB and went to see if there is a 2.5" 2TB. Havent found one yet...

 

anyone know if a new version of this laptop will be coming out or not? I may be looking to pick up a G53 but dont want a new a new version to come out next month. I though they were going to get the 580m upgrade soon. Anyone know about this?

 

The latest one you can get is G53SX. And no please for the love of god dont ever expect a GTX 580M to get crammed up in there.

 

Looking for a used g53, msg me if you're willing to part with yours

 

Greets!

I just recently (as of 5 minutes ago) became a proud owner of a G53SW-XN1. Now, since I have a week before I can really tinker with my new toy as I have exams coming up, I would like to prepare by asking questions:

1. I bought with it a Crucial M4 64GB SSD, I've seen the 4 screws included with my package meaning I probably have the 2nd HDD caddy. How then do I go about installing the SSD? Is there anything I need to do prior to installing? I really don't know much about computers so a step-by-step guide would be very appreciated. I also read there are a few things I should disable to maximize space on the SSD, like hibernate and system restore and defrag and whatnot. Is anyone willing to list them down for me and some instructions on how to do them?

2. I intend to make my SSD the new boot drive (or whatever it is you call the one where Windows is installed) and I intend on following this guide. Is there anything else I need to know? I plan to turn my USB (is 4GB enough?) into a bootable flash drive by following these instructions (its the post with a long quote) to put the Windows ISO and use the ABR (Activation Backup & Restore) program to reactivate my Windows.

3. Do I now install the drivers on the driver disk? I found a thread before containing all the recent drivers and stuff, but I forgot to bookmark it. .

4. Now what? Is there anything I missed? I really don't know much about computers as I usually just play in internet cafes.


TL;DR
I have a new lappy with an SSD, I don't know squat about computers so I would very much appreciate it if somebody would list detailed instructions I could follow that would take me from 1.) Installing and maximizing a 64GB SSD 2.) Clean Install Windows 7 using USB 3.) Driver install 4.) And everything else I probably missed.


On a side note: Wow. . this piece of tech is just amazing. No power issues, tried turning it off. Closing lid, then turning it back on. Keyboard backlight is ok. Very happy with my purchase.

 

I also bought an SSD, this one:

Newegg.com - OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

It will be 115 after the rebate, which is less than a dollar per GB.

This is what I plan to do, and want to know if this is right. I'm under the impression that one hard drive area is SATA III, and the free one is SATA II. So, to get the most out of the SSD, it must be in the SATA III port, so I will move the HD inside to the other slot, then put the SSD in. Then I will update the firmware of the SSD and change it's type from bios to something(forgot what it was)(The OS will still be on the 750GB hard drive), and after that, I will do a clean install of windows on the SSD, and format the 750 GB hard drive(removing partitions).

Anything I miss, or plan wrong, thanks in advance.

 

1. Search youtube for G53JW disassembly or install second hard drive i dont remember but they show strp by step how to take apart the laptop for you to put the 2nd hard drive in. As for the ssd, after you've done installing windows, look for the ssd optimization guide on google and click on the first link, there are about 10 methods, choose as much as you want as there are detailed descriptions for each.
2. 4gb is just enough for the windows installation. IMO you dont really need that program to activate windows, just put in the serial underneath the machine into my computer -> system properties -> activate windows and you're good to go.
3. Use the included driver disk to install, refer to the bloatware guide outside for which not to intall. If you want up to date, install driver genius professional which will find outdated drivers for you automatically.
4. Nope thats it.

Both hdd slots are SATA III, only the one plugged in the optical bay drive is SATA II IIRC.

 

Oh, cool, so I can just install the SSD in the empty slot.

 

I am considering buying back a G53SW-A1.
Anyone know if the last units continue mounted the AUO panel with low contrast?

 

I remember I read somewhere that they had to call Microsoft to get their Windows activated. I must have remembered wrong.

Well, thankyou!

 

normally you wouldnt have to. Thats just the case when your connection is really bad or your license key got problem itself.

 

I had to phone the automated system for my key. I had good internet and everything. Once I've done this though does anyone know if I'll have to do that from now on when I do a fresh install? Or was that a one time thing?

 

You'll have to do it every time. I have done 2 clean reinstalls of my G53SW and both times I had to phone the automated system. It had nothing to do with my internet connection quality.