Clean Installation for Asus G74Sx-BBK8

[LeeEang]

After I had my laptop installed a clean windows 7 home premium, my laptop has become slower that is very noticable. The boot time takes up to more than 1 minute where before it took about 25-30 seconds. I did google it about the booting time, and found they mentioned about the new update of NVIDIA (301.42) which caused the booting to be longer. So I went on downgrading it (using Roll Back function from Device Manager) but it still took more than 1 minute to boot .

Another problem I figured is that the windows is not as smooth as it was before. I don't think I did anything wrong, but it's just slow. I also experienced something I've never encountered. Everytime I open an application, for instance Asus GPU Tweak, it asks me for the permission to open. And it's not only this app, some others app behave the same way too.

Please help me with this.

P.S. I installed all the needed drivers ATK, KB Filter, NVIDIA Driver (296.16), Sound, Chipset, LAN, Wireless LAN, Touchpad (Synaptic not Sentelic) and BIOS 203.

[PILGRIM]

I would always suggest a clean Windows OS installation.
Many of us here in the Forums did this, and are happy with the result.
Also, just install the essential drivers at first, for a day or two, to test
if the laptop is trouble-free. Then you may install and test ASUS' peripheral
applications (bloatwares) that you need, one at a time.

Here's a list of the essential drivers by Brody:
Intel chipset driver
Intel RST
Intel MEI (Windows Update will eventually install this, if you don't want to do it manually)
Nvidia graphics driver
Realtek Ethernet driver
Realtek multi-card reader driver
Fresco USB driver
Wireless adapter driver
Realtek HD Audio driver
Bluetooth driver (if applicable, if wanted)
Touchpad driver
ATK Package

You can find the drivers here: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?5224-Drivers-Apps-and-How-to-s
(As some of the drivers listed on the link are older, you may install the latest drivers from their own respective sites.)
The Windows 7 Home Premium w/SP1 Integrated ISO link here: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24209.iso

For ASUS bloatwares, I installed only the Power4Gear Hybrid, Virtual Camera, and USB Charger.
For hardware upgrades, you would be doing your laptop a favor if you upgrade your HDD into an SSD,
and the problematic Atheros Wi-Fi card into a better one (e.g. Intel Wi-Fi card).

[LeeEang]

PILGRIM wrote:
I would always suggest a clean Windows OS installation.
Many of us here in the Forums did this, and are happy with the result.
Also, just install the essential drivers at first, for a day or two, to test
if the laptop is trouble-free. Then you may install and test ASUS' peripheral
applications (bloatwares) that you need, one at a time.

Here's a list of the essential drivers by Brody:
Intel chipset driver
Intel RST
Intel MEI (Windows Update will eventually install this, if you don't want to do it manually)
Nvidia graphics driver
Realtek Ethernet driver
Realtek multi-card reader driver
Fresco USB driver
Wireless adapter driver
Realtek HD Audio driver
Bluetooth driver (if applicable, if wanted)
Touchpad driver
ATK Package

You can find the drivers here: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?5224-Drivers-Apps-and-How-to-s
(As some of the drivers listed on the link are older, you may install the latest drivers from their own respective sites.)
The Windows 7 Home Premium w/SP1 Integrated ISO link here: http://msft.digitalrivercontent.net/win/X17-24209.iso

For ASUS bloatwares, I installed only the Power4Gear Hybrid, Virtual Camera, and USB Charger.
For hardware upgrades, you would be doing your laptop a favor if you upgrade your HDD into an SSD,
and the problematic Atheros Wi-Fi card into a better one (e.g. Intel Wi-Fi card).

Thanka PILGRIM. Just my curiosity, what difference does it make if I upgrade to better Wi-Fi card? Does it actually improve the performance? Or it just has better Wi-Fi connection? I also thought of getting SSD but then the booting time of my hard drive isn't that bad (about 30 seconds) until I had a clean installation. I wanted to wait until Black Friday to see if SSD will drop its price a bit more.

You mentioned you had Virtual Camera and USB Charger installed. What do those 2 do? I don't really understand the use of Virtual Camera. And USB charger, isn't it just charging your electronic devices like phone or ipod?

One last question, does WIndows 7 Home Premium and Ulitimate make a really big difference in performance? I was thinking of buying a genuine Windows 7 Ulitimate, but if these two aren't that much of a difference, I'll stick with Home Premium.

[PILGRIM]

LeeEang wrote:
Thanka PILGRIM. Just my curiosity, what difference does it make if I upgrade to better Wi-Fi card? Does it actually improve the performance? Or it just has better Wi-Fi connection? I also thought of getting SSD but then the booting time of my hard drive isn't that bad (about 30 seconds) until I had a clean installation. I wanted to wait until Black Friday to see if SSD will drop its price a bit more.

You mentioned you had Virtual Camera and USB Charger installed. What do those 2 do? I don't really understand the use of Virtual Camera. And USB charger, isn't it just charging your electronic devices like phone or ipod?

One last question, does WIndows 7 Home Premium and Ulitimate make a really big difference in performance? I was thinking of buying a genuine Windows 7 Ulitimate, but if these two aren't that much of a difference, I'll stick with Home Premium.

The stock Atheros Wi-Fi was glitchy. Wi-Fi connection was slower.
It even made my offline game (NBA 2K12) to hang/freeze in-game.
Changed it with the much better Intel 6230 Wi-Fi card and never looked back ever since.
Don't know,.. perhaps the Atheros card works better now with a newer driver?

As our fellow member, fostert, used to say, having an SSD for our G74 is the best upgrade
we can do for it. The HDD is the bottleneck for the G74's optimal performance.

Which reminds of that Virtual Camera. I haven't used the G74's camera for ages..
Why do I still have that utility?..:confused: That's right, the USB Charger is for phone-charging.
Point is, use any of the ASUS utilities (bloatwares) that are personally deemed useful.

I've used both Windows Home Premium (currently installed) and Ultimate.
No noticeable difference in performance, big or small, IMO..
Only thing with Ultimate (and Pro version) is that it allows the G74 to upgrade
the RAM all the way up to 32 GB. I have 16 GB RAM on my system.
And I say it's already an overkill as per my computer usage.

[LeeEang]

PILGRIM wrote:
The stock Atheros Wi-Fi was glitchy. Wi-Fi connection was slower.
It even made my offline game (NBA 2K12) to hang/freeze in-game.
Changed it with the much better Intel 6230 Wi-Fi card and never looked back ever since.
Don't know,.. perhaps the Atheros card works better now with a newer driver?

As our fellow member, fostert, used to say, having an SSD for our G74 is the best upgrade
we can do for it. The HDD is the bottleneck for the G74's optimal performance.

Which reminds of that Virtual Camera. I haven't used the G74's camera for ages..
Why do I still have that utility?..:confused: That's right, the USB Charger is for phone-charging.
Point is, use any of the ASUS utilities (bloatwares) that are personally deemed useful.

I've used both Windows Home Premium (currently installed) and Ultimate.
No noticeable difference in performance, big or small, IMO..
Only thing with Ultimate (and Pro version) is that it allows the G74 to upgrade
the RAM all the way up to 32 GB. I have 16 GB RAM on my system.
And I say it's already an overkill as per my computer usage.

Thanks for all of the advices. I'll just stick with Home Premium since the ram isn't even used up to 8GB. Btw, what brand for SSD would you recommend? I saw a Micron Crucial 256GB but don't know if it's a trusted brand.

Have you ever tried Ubuntu on G74? I love using Ubuntu but then it didn't recognize the NVIDIA driver. All the key functions work except the brightness that wouldn't go dim even though it showed that the brightness was at the lowest. I did look up for solutions and I tried all of those but still it didn't work, so I ended up removing it.

[fostert]

LeeEang wrote:
Have you ever tried Ubuntu on G74? I love using Ubuntu but then it didn't recognize the NVIDIA driver. All the key functions work except the brightness that wouldn't go dim even though it showed that the brightness was at the lowest. I did look up for solutions and I tried all of those but still it didn't work, so I ended up removing it.

I use Linux 24/7 on my G74 (the Debian testing distro) and have gotten most of the G74's functions (keyboard backlight, volume, screen brightness, etc) to work, but strangely the fn-F keycombos to control these things only work when GDM is loaded and I haven't logged in yet to start X. Once I log in and run a Window Manager it seems, all the key combos stop working. I have learned to set everything up how I like it upon GDM startup so its not a terrible loss.

Also using Linux has somewhat solved the NUMLOCK woes on the G74: strangely the system boots with the NUMLOCK state off (i.e. the numpad behaves like Home/PgUp/PgDown/Insert, Del,End). I can toggle the NUMLOCK on using the CAPSLOCK key (weird, eh?). But it does show that the NUMLOCK problem is completely and easily fixed: we just need ASUS to release a BIOS that remaps the NUMLOCK to the (useless) calculator key.

Anyhow, to get all this functionality I use the pre-compiled Kernel 3.2 from the Debian Testing distro. This kernel has the common ASUS key controls turned on. I also use the NVIDIA Linux drivers version 295.40. You'll need to have the the full kernel source and in particular the kernel headers installed to install the NVIDIA driver, as it compiles using these headers.

[LeeEang]

fostert wrote:
I use Linux 24/7 on my G74 (the Debian testing distro) and have gotten most of the G74's functions (keyboard backlight, volume, screen brightness, etc) to work, but strangely the fn-F keycombos to control these things only work when GDM is loaded and I haven't logged in yet to start X. Once I log in and run a Window Manager it seems, all the key combos stop working. I have learned to set everything up how I like it upon GDM startup so its not a terrible loss.

Also using Linux has somewhat solved the NUMLOCK woes on the G74: strangely the system boots with the NUMLOCK state off (i.e. the numpad behaves like Home/PgUp/PgDown/Insert, Del,End). I can toggle the NUMLOCK on using the CAPSLOCK key (weird, eh?). But it does show that the NUMLOCK problem is completely and easily fixed: we just need ASUS to release a BIOS that remaps the NUMLOCK to the (useless) calculator key.

Anyhow, to get all this functionality I use the pre-compiled Kernel 3.2 from the Debian Testing distro. This kernel has the common ASUS key controls turned on. I also use the NVIDIA Linux drivers version 295.40. You'll need to have the the full kernel source and in particular the kernel headers installed to install the NVIDIA driver, as it compiles using these headers.

I just couldn't get Ubuntu to recognize the video card. I've tried the threads people posted on other website about the issue but it still didn't work out. So if you don't mind, please guide me through the steps. All the function keys worked fine when I had Ubuntu installed. It's just the brightness didn't change; it wouldn't lower the light.

Btw, does G74 last longer on Linux? I had Ubuntu installed on my other laptop and it gives me more battery life, that's why I wonder if it does the same thing on G74.

[fostert]

LeeEang wrote:
Btw, does G74 last longer on Linux? I had Ubuntu installed on my other laptop and it gives me more battery life, that's why I wonder if it does the same thing on G74.

Yes it does. I experience noticeably longer battery runtimes in Linux than in Windows (I have both installed in a dual boot congifuration on my G74). Windows just runs so much crap in the background to keep itself alive. The proof? For fun I just rebooted and pared down windows 7 manually by killing all processes in the task mangler except its bare processes (i even killed svchost processes, which are your windows features like network access, etc): it still takes 1.3GB of RAM just to keep a barebones Windows 7 running. I can do the same in Linux, and guess what? It only takes 230MB of RAM to keep X windows running. I can further kill X and run Linux happily from a command line terminal alone: it only takes 160MB of RAM to do this!

So, which do you think it going to make the battery last longer?

[LeeEang]

fostert wrote:
Yes it does. I experience noticeably longer battery runtimes in Linux than in Windows (I have both installed in a dual boot congifuration on my G74). Windows just runs so much crap in the background to keep itself alive. The proof? For fun I just rebooted and pared down windows 7 manually by killing all processes in the task mangler except its bare processes (i even killed svchost processes, which are your windows features like network access, etc): it still takes 1.3GB of RAM just to keep a barebones Windows 7 running. I can do the same in Linux, and guess what? It only takes 230MB of RAM to keep X windows running. I can further kill X and run Linux happily from a command line terminal alone: it only takes 160MB of RAM to do this!

So, which do you think it going to make the battery last longer?

It makes a lot of sense. Windows has a lot of craps running at the background while Linux runs only the things needed to operate an OS.

[gilbert]

i have the same g74sx and i also did a clean install, after switching to a ssd with any new vga driver i get a long black boot up , so i had to try some of the older ones now im running 268,37 and my boot up time is very low 17 seconds , but if i change my vga driver up again to any new one my boot up time goes up almost to a whole minute, try it you will see that it works.

[PILGRIM]

Hi, gilbert. I referenced to the OP about the thread where you mentioned
about your laptop's peculiarity (my post #6). I understand your case is different.

But we know that newer nVidia driver updates also makes the later games (and other programs)
better, supposedly. So, I'm curious on how the newer games (if ever you play them) play on the
nVidia 268.37 version. Aren't you complaining about their playability?.. Aren't there any problem/s at all?..