Vicious's G50V-A1 Review

I used ghost until I was pointed to Acronis True Image.

Best investment you'll ever make! I have an image for every machine and lappy in my house/office

 

You'd probably have to make the image via Ethernet network, and have Acronis build/put it into it's own partition on the desktop HDD, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for restoring it off network HDD as compared to direct restore from external HDD or hidden partition on the same drive.

I've also used TrueImage without incident over several years for drive cloning, etc. Never tried what I describe above, though, so ymmv. You can get ATI for less than $30 at NewEgg or Ebay.

 

I D/L the trial of Acronis it does have some cool tools but it wont do the job just right.

It will not let you back up or restore over a network it has to be a physically attached disk, and the backup size is the same as the original (no compression) so I dont even have enough disk space on the laptop to make a image and then transfer it over.

The other thing is that for the most part you have to have windows to operate it. You can create a bootable disk and use that but the data still has to be on the disk.

This wont work since I can not store any data on the HDD's swiching from Raid 0 to non raid will destroy all data on the disks.

My only solution is to reduce my data on my disks so that less than 50% of the disk space is used. Install it on the laptop (its on the desktop right now) create the backup image + bootable disk.

Transfer the backup image to the desktop and then setup the drives.

From there I would still need an external hdd or something and put the image on there and restore it from there.

Thats one good thing Ghost can do, it can create an image for you and put it on a series of disks. Thats very powerful and something acronis can not do. The backup image from ghost can be booted and installed on a fresh computer with no OS or anything. Just boot with the first disk and install the next disk when it asks for it and walla back to square one.

However this would not work so well with a large image like mine (300gb or so)

 

Wait. I am pretty sure I saw compression options for Acronis True Image. Maybe it's disabled in the trial version, or maybe it just defaults to no compression, but the options should be there.

Also, I don't see why it wouldn't backup over network. In the worst case you'd need to map a network drive. Then it should save the image on that drive, as if it were a local drive. The problem is with restoring, though, because there's no Windows to boot into and mount the network drive to restore. Maybe the Acronis bootable disk offers network connectivity? I don't know. Be aware that the bootable disk isn't usable from a trial version.

There is still a caveat, though. I'm not sure how it would work with RAID. As long as the RAID controller isolates the details of the HDD from Windows though, it should be fine, since Acronis still sees the RAID partition as a plain partition.

 

Compression - Yeah it has it, it just didnt say it on the main options or program notes I had to go thru and actually use the program to see it. Default is like 55% if you use advanced options you can make it 65%

Mapping a network drive would probably work for the drive issue, I have done that at work for our server but never done it for something like my home network I just use file sharing when I need to xfer things.

As far as raid it should be fine, its a hardware level raid so so windows and all things in windows see it as a single drive, a software raid may be different tho.

This brings up a good question. I do have a little 160gb external its full, so I just took off some of the stuff I dont need and the rest I was going to compress and toss onto my desktop hdd. On my desktop hdd I have like 200gb of movie files. Do you think for files that you just want to archive and save incase you ever need them something like winrar is better or acronis? 55% compression is not bad but you have to have the software to restore from the .tib file while winrar is free and I am unsure of the compression level.

So say you have 200gb of movies tho and you want to reduce the amount of space they take up by compressing it, but you may want to watch one of them at some point whats the best way to go? Acronis is made for backup more than just compression for saving space but I know it can open a archive and let you just pull the files you want out of it and not do a full restore. Not sure how fast that process is tho.

 

I don't know whether Acronis or disk imaging & backup software in general should be used as an archiving/filing tool. Their strength is total or incremental backup of folders or entire partitions, which can be restored in case of loss of the original data.

For archiving / filing, I think F5 or Ctrl+C should do fine for most users. Next, about compression.

Movies: it depends on the type of movie but a good codec is already a highly efficient compression tool in itself, so I fear archiving a movie file is not going to save much space, if any. I think it's best to just copy them.

Same goes for JPEG images and MP3 music.

For text documents or other "airy" data such as bitmaps or game savefiles, you can use whatever archiver you're most comfortable with. I'm using ZIP myself, because from Total Commander, which I use, ZIP files look (almost) like normal directories.

 

Im running winrar over the external hdd files now at the highest compression setting it just says "best" under the ratio its saying 97% tho while its working. Its going to take all night tho, just for 90gb or so of files with all 4 cores of my quad at 80% (3.7ghz mind you) its saying its going to be a 10 hour job. I wonder how much space its going to save....

Its almost all mp3's and movie files lol I read your post after the fact.

 

That's why it's 97%, because it's movies and MP3. You can leave it running overnight just to be sure, but I'll bet you won't get almost any space saving out of this... Coupled with the fact that the files are going to be "locked" inside the archive without easy access for playing the music/movie, it's a win-little-lose-much situation...

I'm also not sure about that 55% or 65% of Acronis. Is it a setting for the compression algorithm, or an estimate of the compression ratio of the backup? In either case it doesn't necessarily reflect the actual compression ratio of the final backup. I fully expect system files are "airy" and can be compressed efficiently (think pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys, for instance), so backing up C: w/ archiving will gain space. But for data and media partitions where most of the stuff has efficient codecs, again, there's not much space savings. And I will stress again that the purpose of ATI is not archiving, but backup and disk cloning.

 

Yeah I understand, one of these days I am going to build a file server and use the Microsoft Home server OS and it does everything on its own, auto backup, file storage, lets your files be acceptable online. Its a great thing to have and my wife will be at ease since I have lost a lot of photos of our kids on more than one occasion by accidentally not backing them up before a wipe.

If i was big on backups this is definitely the route I would take, it does not take much to run that server.

I still have my beta tester software so guess I should put it to use.

 

Just ordered a G50V-A1 largely thanks to your review Vicious!

$1765 after shipping and taxes, chaching.

 

Cool another one joins the club! To bad we don't live local to each other have a huge g50 lan party

I always wanted to have/go to one of those but back in the day I didn't even have a computer.

 

I've never fiddled with compression on acronis, but i have using Norton Ghost. Which DOES the job, I just hated having all the BS loaded on any machine I made the backup with. It allows for network backups etc.

 

Yeah, I think I am just gonna stick with the Raid 0 for now.

I think in 2 years rather than build a new pc I will just go for the file server.

 

I intend to sell my 250GB HDD and replace it with a 32GB OCZ Core Drive... >=D

 

Hey, how come the G50V comes with Vista 64, but the Asus website often only offers Vista 32 drivers?

 

Anyone live in/near Houston? I am down with a G50V LAN party. (TF 2, COD 4, whateva)

 

They are dual drivers, but all the newest ones should be on your drivers disk at this point so its easier to use the disk and do the install all function and leave for an hour or so if your doing a fresh install.

 

Not me. Did you by any chance go to ROGCon? They DID have a huge G50V lan party going on there. If I lived in Houston I would have tried really hard to make it to that event.

I found the picture

 

There are newer WLAN and Chipset drivers direct from Intel, if anyone's curious.

 

I just hate the BT drivers. Everything else is good for me. That and I did update the video drivers.

 

"Express Gate which allows you instant (1-2 seconds) access to web browser and media browser without booting to the OS does not work in a RAID0 setup which is what I chose. I think the intent of this is for ease of use and to save battery power. With RAID0 and running at full performance you only get 1:20 hours out of this, at battery saver and screen brightness way down you get 2:00 hours. I can put up with that though because it's basically plugged in at home or at work."

It's True?

User's Review..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220377

 

Sweet, I've never heard of ROGCon, I probably wouldn't go anyway wouldn't want to get embarrassed.

 

Wow, I see a huge problem with this picture. Who can play computer games well with a mouse on a cloth like that? Esp with it loose and moving around. Not I! I would have pulled the cloth up or brought a smooth piece of wood or plastic to game on. Im not a big gamer but I know that cloth can be evil.

 

cool review, just curious, the first part of the review, where the screen quality is tested, made me think of an important question: does anybody happen to know what Asus and the various Asus resellers' policies are about dead/stuck pixels?

I'm not currently looking for a laptop, but if I was I think I'd buy this one =)

my only concern would be above mentioned issue, as the euphoria of my last two laptop purchases in a row got totally spoiled by initially getting a unit with a dead pixel =(

guess I seem to have bad luck with that XD go figure.

also, is the G50 the only one that comes in black and orange? They don't make the G70 with that color scheme do they?

 

Only one color

Warranty has you covered with the pixels: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=25849#deadpixels

Asus has the best Warranty around really, 2 years, + accients coverage + dead pixel coverage.

 

I'm with my A2, it's very Nice! ViciousXUSMC thanks for review..

 

That user had enabled RAID 0. It appears that Express Gate does not work with RAID0 enabled. (or maybe ExpressGate requires to be reinstalled after enabling RAID0)

 

Awesome machine...I think it will greatly replace my G1S maybe next year

BTW I can't open any of the images, @ViciousXUSMC, could you post the 3D mark points on the images ? Thanks

 

Just short of 6000, its not really high but its good enough to play games. Once we find overclocking possible things should get better.

 

Did you try evga precision like I recommended vicious?

 

Na not yet, but I thought it only works with EVGA cards? I know people were flashing there 4850's to the EVGA bios just to use that program on desktops.

Drivers are a issue too everything reads the card as a 9700GS except for the nvidia control panel with the 177.79's so I may have to find a alternate display driver.

 

anyone got any idea when this will be availiable in the UK? sorry if this has been asked. I gave it a fairly hard look on the forums. Unfortunately internet keeps cutting out which makes it difficult.

 

hey maybe someone can help me out. Im lookin for a laptop that can run The Sims2 will all the expansion packs too. I'm not a computer wiz and i was wondering if this one could? My son loves The Sims2 and our PC currently cant handle it with all the packs. Thanks.

 

Hi, welcome to the forums. Please don't double post, I'm sure people will answer even if you post in a single place.

I will remove the other post. Thanks.

 

Never played the sims2 but I do not think its very demanding. This should play it with ease.

 

Ok well....the thing is there are believe it or not, 7 expansion packs that each require at least 1.6 Ghz, ATI Radeon 8600 vid card and some other specs i cant recall. I know in theory it should run it but its a really massive game with all those expansions. Anyways if anyone knows or has tried The Sims2 on this G50V laptop let me know. Thank you.

 

Yeah well 1.6ghz is less than half of what you have on here, and the ati 8600 is also way less than half. I may be able to see if the game is on the list of games for system check.

There is a website that diagnosis your hardware and compares it to game requirements and tells you how good it can run it. I will check it out later.

 

Thanks so much. Its much appreciated. Just want to make sure it for sure can run it with the expansion packs before we decide to get a new computer. I'll be on here periodically to check. Once again thanks for the help.

 

You can also subscribe to the thread and you'll be sent an email when people post in it. (Not one email for each post though, one mail and then the system waits until you check)

 

Oh i found all the required specs for the game. 2.0 Ghz for vista, 1.0 Gig of Ram for vista, 8x cd/dvd drive, 1.5 gig of free space, ATI Radeon 9600/Nvidia Geforce 6200 or greater for vista. Hope some of this helps. Insanely as i mentioned, there is the main game and 6-7 expansion packs (he has them all). Each needing hard drive space.

 

I will do that then, thanks.

 

The A1 with 500 Gigabytes of drive space will leave you with plenty of room to spare

As for those specs, your seriously almost over 4 fold on everything this machine will play the sims easy trust me.

 

great thats exactly what i wanted to hear. They have one at the computer store right by my house so i will probably pick one up. Thanks for the help.

 

Computer Store make sure its the A1 and not the X1 if your taking about best buy.

 

hmmm ... noticed on the left side there's a port for a TV antenna. manual says "on selected models" -- but which ones? none that i can find on the A1, B1 or X specs ...

 

Yeah none of them come with the tuner, in the U.S. it almost never has or will, the reasons why are complicated.

You can buy one and put it in yourself tho.

 

So I just did the video driver update, felt the performance increase immediately! One odd thing though -- in my device man my GPU now comes up as 9700m GS, is this norm/does it have any kind of negative impact?

 

Just a thing because the drivers are not supported. If the card works fine no ill effects to worry about. Your only changing the drivers not the bios. Bios mods can cause damage.

If we do not find software to overclock soon a bios mod may be the only way tho.

 

is there an ASUS part for this, or is a Hauppauge express card the better way to go, do you think?

 

Id use a tv tuner card of sorts if it was a priority. I mean FTA tv is gone soon anyways and you need a digital tuner and all that jazz. There is an Asus part but I do not know it off hand.