(G750JH-DB71)7Laptop Repair Company Replaced Mobo and installed wrong BIOS, help!

[JarekCyphus]

**RESOLVED...sorta**

Laptop FUBAR'ed by Just Laptops in Virginia Beach, by installing a JW mobo into the shell of a JH model G750, after a power jack and ac adapter failure. Better-informed and more-asus-experienced tech later informed me of the many problems the G750 line suffers from and how many he gets in the shop per-day.

Moral of the story: skip the G750 unless you've got no other option. ASUS has a few other laptops that are a better bang for your buck, anyway!

[hmscott]

JarekCyphus wrote:
To make a long story short: My laptop suffered from a mental breakdown a few weeks ago. I initially came to these forums over a year ago with the problem that my battery would not charge (plugged in, not charging). Along with that issue was the fact that the laptop would intermittently not start, restart, or shutdown correctly. Since I mostly use the laptop at home, I removed the battery and ran only on AC power, and all my issues went away. Had over a full year of non stop fun and gaming on a solid rig. Two weeks ago, someone put a bug in my ear that a few local laptop repair places reported several G750s of varying models as having faulty voltage coming out of their factory AC adapters. Before I could even put leads up to check it, I noticed my laptop wasn't even turning on, anymore. When I removed the power jack, all of my backlighting and plugged-in USB devices lit up and then extinguished. DEAD.

Fast forward a week and I had to replace a jack, an AC adapter (running at about 18VDC, instead of 19.5, and with intermittent AC voltage, nowhere near 230W), and a motherboard before the laptop would come back on. Then they called to tell me that none of my devices were being recognized unless they were plugged in one at a time. I could only have one SSD installed or the laptop would shut itself off, and with one SSD and my HDD installed, the HDD wouldn't be recognized. It loaded windows fine, so I decided to eat the $80 labor cost and take it home and see what I could figure out.

Not only do I not have an in-BIOS utility for flashing the BIOS, I dxdiag'ed my ASUS to discover that the knuckleheads had installed the G750JW v207 bios in my G750JH!!! For a place that's YELP'ed 5-stars, that is a ****ty thing to overlook. Now I'm here, unable to install any drivers to my CPU, GPU, or any of my Razer products because they're all rejected. It doesn't recognize the type of hardware on my board AT ALL, and I think the problem is the BIOS, but I don't know how to flash it when the WinFlash utility doesn't even recognize this as an ASUS Notebook and I can't find the flash utility in my BIOS!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

JarekCyphus, you should do the same as you should have done when you had the problems a year ago. Send it to Asus for warranty repair.

It isn't worth the headache to have a non-Asus repair place work on an Asus laptop, they tend to mess it up. Upgrading disks can even be a headache, they blow away the Asus install and make their own, and since they aren't familiar with the Asus support site, they install old drivers, or not enough drivers, and they also don't know about the recovery partition or how to back it up.

Asus is very good about supporting their hardware, it takes some time, it may cost you if you wait too long to fix it - past warranty time - but Asus doesn't charge much and often do the work for free even past warranty.

Now, you are likely going to have to hope Asus is very understanding. Explain the situation to them via a Technical Inquiry, apologize for creating this situation, and ask Asus for their kind help getting you out of it.

1) Ask Asus if they would like you to take back your G750JH to the 3rd party repair place to restore all the components they took out, or if Asus is ok just swapping out the motherboard the 3rd party people mistakenly incorrectly installed.

Depending on the answer Asus gives you, you may need to ask the 3rd party repair place to restore all the parts back in to your G750JH before sending on to Asus for repair. You can ask for your money back after they do this 🙂

https://vip.asus.com <== create login, register your laptop, file the Technical Inquiry - try to be clear and concise and positive 🙂

Please come back and let us know how it works out 🙂

[JarekCyphus]

As before, I appreciate your help, HMScott, but *AS* before, my experience with ASUS CSRs have been abysmal at best, both then and now. I just want to know how I can install the original BIOS for my machine *WITHOUT* removing the CMOS, if that's even possible.

[hmscott]

JarekCyphus wrote:
As before, I appreciate your help, HMScott, but *AS* before, my experience with ASUS CSRs have been abysmal at best, both then and now. I just want to know how I can install the original BIOS for my machine *WITHOUT* removing the CMOS, if that's even possible.

JarekCyphus, have you tried? Did the BIOS installer - WinFlash or in Bios - allow you to use a G750JH BIOS file? Try adding /nodate to the Winflash command / command line to see if that helps. You need to know if you have a JHA or JH - pick the right JH/JHA BIOS.



The reason I didn't answer as you obviously wanted, is that I didn't want to get into the whole - did they install a JW motherboard or JH motherboard and flashed the wrong BIOS. I can't help you with that.

It is too big of a mess right now to help you if you can't flash the correct BIOS. You need to get it back to the service place that did the damage and demand they fix it.

But, knowing how those things go, I suggested skipping all this and getting Asus involved to set it all right.

Please let us know how it works out.

[Jlieu]

Your motherboard probably been replaced, scammed maybe? as i know they always get part from china and replace it, china have alot of asus model that match. wrong bios flash usually will cause immediate failure, as different instruction executed in different hardware configuration during power on. BUT wrong bios flash is IMPOSSIBLE, as already limited by utility.

please use services by asus only! Any third party provider are strongly not recommended.

[JarekCyphus]

The motherboard was actually the incorrect part. It was a JW board, not a JH/JHA board. Hence the wrong BIOS. I took it to an actual ASUS expert in a nearby city, and he set the record straight. Apparently, according to him, the entire G750 line is a heap of junk; an "utter QC nightmare," as he put it. Regardless from where people are buying them, there's often a problem with them having power jack, ac adapter, motherboard short circuit, or all of the above issues. Delta Electronics apparently makes crap laptop power adapters, and the generation of bricks that came with the G750s were no exception.

Long story short, I'm dealing with ASUS again, because the entire problem occurred because I sent the laptop to them over a year ago on warranty informing them that I had the "plugged in, not charging" issue. They chalked it up to a driver issue, and when I got it back, it still had that problem. The guy I ultimately took the laptop to (who told me about the 750 issues) was also originally the guy who metered my AC power adapter and said "18 volts is too low; it's not even getting 230W." Once again, despite the customer being right, ASUS was of no help - I was outside my one year warranty. So even though some folks have had some luck outside the warranty, I was apparently getting the old bitty from a foreign country who spoke barely any English and didn't give a rat's ass about my "furthered customer loyalty to ASUS."

Then, the short circuit happened. Pow! If you can autopsy a laptop, Drew (of PC Rehab in Virginia Beach) deduced that the weakened brick let a surge through, shorting the jack to the logic board, which thusly shorted to the MB. Seems a pretty reasonable diagnosis, since that's what two laptop repair companies (and Geek Squad if they even count anymore) reasoned had failed. I've been around electronics most of my life, and while I'm no laptop EXPERT, I am a licensed electrician and a former AE in the Navy—I'm prior enlisted—and I can tell you that if a power surge through a contact can blow a 2T heat pump system, then a laptop is no match for it, regardless of how good the protection is.

So I junked what parts survived, had them certified, and ebayed them to fund my new G751JY that's already on the way. Ears on the ground tell me it's a pretty reliable laptop, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping this beast will get me back gaming, testing, schooling, and programming in no time!

Thanks for everyone's help, though. I'm bummed that it came down to this, but lesson learned; in the future I'll wait for the laptops to be on sale longer than a month before buying them, haha.

**UPDATE** The good news is that Just Laptops is refunding me the cost of the motherboard **AND** the labor incurred for all three parts they serviced. That'll go a long way toward offsetting the cost of a new computer.

[hmscott]

JarekCyphus, wow, thanks for all the details, sounds like you had a lemon to start that finally committed Seppuku 🙂

The G750's have their share of lemons, but I got 3 good ones in a row, a JW, JX, and finally a JH, and no power brick failures among any - including a spare I bought for the JH.

The G751's have their share of lemons too, but you will likely get a good one, Asus seems to have gotten through the early production problems - but check out your new JY thoroughly and return it to the seller if you find any fit and finish, temperature, IPS screen bleed, etc issues.

If your power in your area is spikey, you might want to invest in an isolation transformer to catch the brunt of the current from the spikes. I had to do that when I had a place in Yosemite, blew out a Macintosh Plus power supply 15 minutes after I plugged it in. Then monitored the line and found it was pretty poor power - but a 50lb isolation transformer fixed it right up. I would occasionally hear the isolation transformer ping/zing - but my computers kept running just fine 🙂

The G750JY uses a Delta make power brick too... and the glitches are: loose fitting power connector to the laptop, and there is a new power saving mode that the power adapter goes into - when you disconnect your laptop from the power at the laptop the power adapter "turns off" after a short while and you need to unplug/plug in the power adapter to get it to work again. I would put it on a switched power strip and turn it off/on at the power strip to avoid the hassle of the adapter powering itself off.

Read threw the G751 forum / stickies for other hints and kinks 🙂