Asus g74sx help

[kdogg21]

Asus g74sx help
Hi there people

i am having trouble with my g74sx. im having problems with bsod's and on a few occasions i have had the boot device screen where it tells you to put a boot device into the oc and press any key. im pretty sure myself that it is a failing hardrive because i also get a small whistle from where it is. my 2 part questions are 1. since i did not recieve a recovery disc and i was dumb enough not to create a factory state backup on dvds when i first recieved this laptop, is there any way to recieve or if there is a partition backup i can activate. and 2. if not and i have to buy windows 7 , to make sure there is a low chance of my hd dying agn is it better to buy an ssd and which are compatible?

Can anyone suggest anything that may help me?

thanks

[Pitcher1]

you can press F9 to restore your OS, also you can visit asus e-store to buy restore CD.

[Zygomorphic]

Pitcher@asus wrote:
you can press F9 to restore your OS, also you can visit asus e-store to buy restore CD.

There is another way. Download the Win 7 ISO from microsoft, and burn it to a DVD. When you replace the HDD, reinstall windows from this disk. When prompted, put in the product code on the sticker on the bottom of the laptop. You will have a licensed Win 7 installation, but you will need to find the drivers yourself (in some cases). To find the drivers, either go to the driver vendor's website (nVidia is one), or get on ASUS' support website and download the (albeit often out-of-date) drives there.

[kdogg21]

u mean when the system starts? kinda like when u press f8 for the safe mode option?

[kdogg21]

do you think its worth installing an ssd on the g74sx?

[dstrakele]

I can't imagine anybody that would want to do that... ;>{) >

[kdogg21]

lol i have some money to spend thanks for the advice all

[dstrakele]

As others have posted on this subject, it's probably the best performance bang for your bucks.

It may also be worthwhile to investigate creating a RAM disk or using a RAM caching utility for your HDD like Fancy Cache.

[Zygomorphic]

dstrakele wrote:
As others have posted on this subject, it's probably the best performance bang for your bucks.

It may also be worthwhile to investigate creating a RAM disk or using a RAM caching utility for your HDD like Fancy Cache.

Get an SSD, they provide a huge perceived performance jump, because, relatively speaking, the slowest component of a current system is the spinning platter drive.

As to @dstrakele's, suggestion of a RAM disk, you need to have enough RAM for that to be effective. Before going that route, I would advise 16+ GB of RAM, unless your RAM disk is really small. The G74SX does support 32 GB, as multiple people have confirmed.

[dstrakele]

kdogg21 wrote:
i am having trouble with my g74sx. im having problems with bsod's and on a few occasions i have had the boot device screen where it tells you to put a boot device into the oc and press any key. im pretty sure myself that it is a failing hardrive because i also get a small whistle from where it is...

While any new noise from a HDD is suspicious, consider running CHKDSK C: /F /R from an elevated Command Prompt (right-click on the Command Prompt icon and choose "Run as administrator" from the popup menu) to confirm your file system is sound. Modify the drive letter specified in the Command to test the other partitions on the drive. A corrupt file system is capable of producing the errors you describe.

Determine the manufacturer of the HDD from Device Manager, then download the proprietary disk diagnostic utility to test if the HDD itself is healthy. You can also test with HDTune.

If your file system and HDD check out okay, you can troubleshoot your BSOD issues further with a utility like BlueScreenView.