I bought my G73JW-A1 in October 2010 from Computer Upgrade Kings as an upgraded machine with a core i7-840QM and 16gb of ram, as well as a Blu-ray lightscribe DVD drive upgrade. I have been having problems with the machine since I got it, relating to the nVidia 460M drivers freezing. I assumed all this time that it was related to nvidia issues since they were releasing new drivers weekly for awhile.
Last Friday, I got a fatal BSOD that was unrecoverable just after I accidentally pushed the overdrive/overclock button (one of the 3 in the upper-left corner of the laptop. I formatted the drive and tried to do a fresh install but could not make it through the install without a BSOD. All of the crash dump files were vastly different and many of them pointed to memory corruption. several STOP 0x50 - PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA fault or IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and others. I ran the bootable memtest86+ and came up with literally hundreds of errors in the third and fourth stick.
I removed all of the ram except for the "hard-to-reach" slot and tried to boot the memtest86+ disc and the laptop would not boot. I then dismantled everything and swapped to another stick in that slot and tried to boot again...nothing... I installed another stick in one of the other slots (so now 8gb) and it booted just fine and memtest gave no errors at all, with 6 iterations of the test. I then installed the third stick and got errors, though less than 100. I swapped stick 2 and 3 and got errors in the same address range, so it is not the ram itself.
So, the laptop will only run on 2 sticks. I then tried an experiment and installed the pair in the "hard-to-reach" slot and the uppermost slot (furthest from the motherboard) and it would not boot. Lights came on but not the screen and the fans ran at full blast until I unplugged AC and battery.
To get back up and running, I had to buy a new hard drive due to so many bad sectors and run on half the memory. while troubleshooting, I ran CPU-Z and caught the "Engineering Sample" chip annotation. I have a feeling that it is a motherboard problem at least, but if I send it to ASUS for RMA, which I have 5 months left on warranty, they will not honor the warranty with that black-market CPU in the socket.
I saw another thread on here about this from the same reseller, on someone with a G74 with the same issue, but there was no resolution posted. I have no idea where to go from here, I am not sure about sending it to the reseller to fix, but I don't know what my options are...
I am in college on a full-ride from the VA because I am an 80% disabled combat veteran and the VA actually paid for this laptop via reimbursement, so I cannot afford a new motherboard if the warranty is voided. I need this machine for school. 8gb is not enough ram for me, I run matlab and solidworks a lot, often at the same time.
Hopefully MASON@ASUS or Chastity@ASUS will see this and respond as well.
If anyone knows what might be causing the problem, I am all ears... HELP!!!
