Just bought the midrange G750JS on April 7th and had some pretty difficult 10 hours installing Win 7 and having all drivers to work and all so wanted to share it with you guys. The good news is that you can make it all work just perfectly fine. I've been playing a lot of games and doing video editing on win 7.
I am a fan of clean installs – new installation on a freshly formatted PC. That’s what I did to my very first generation RoG (was it the G63?) that I bought back in 2010 and still runs perfectly with no need to format for 4 years and no firewalls/antivirus crap on it.
First of all installing a clean Win 7 will most likely wipe everything INCLUDING THE RECOVERY PARTITION and I will explain why later, so I recommend using the ASUS Backtracker to get your recovery partition off your hard drive and onto a USB drive. For some reason ASUS put the recovery on the SSD drive where every GB counts. This way you’ll free up 20GB there and it is worth it anyway.
ASUS Backtracker:
http://www.asus.com/supportonly/ASUS_Backtracker/ BIOS settings:
1. Restart your computer, hit F2 and enter BIOS.
2. Go to your Security tab, go the Secure Boot and DISABLE it.
3. GO back to the Boot tab and ENABLE both Launch CSM and Launch PXE OpROM.
4. Exit and Save settings and upon restart hit F2 to enter bios again.
5. Under the Boot tab you will now see the options to select to boot from the DVD Rom or other devices. Use the + / - to change the boot priority. If you want to boot from a USB, plug it in your computer and restart again and you will see it there as well.
Installing Win 7
1. You might think this is trivial but with the new UEFI bioses it is not as easy as it used to be.
2. If you try to install it the regular way, upon selecting a partition you’ll get the following message: “Windows cannot be installed to this disk the selected disk is of the GPT partition style.”
3. Hit cancel and go back in the Windows installer (or restart the PC and start anew) to the screen where you get to hit the “Install Now” in the middle of the screen.
4. Hit F10 and you’ll go to the console.
5. Type “DISKPART”
6. Type “LIST”
7. Type “SELECT DISK 0”
8. Type “CLEAN”
9. Type “CONVERT MBR”
10. This will clean up the drive of all partitions including the Recovery partition. It will delete everything. Converting to MBR is really important especially if you’ll need to activate windows later (activators won’t work if you don’t do that).
11. YOU NEED TO REPEAT THE OPERATION FOR ALL HARD DRIVES INSTALLED OR WIN 7 FREAKS OUT AND WON”T INSTALL.
12. Type “DISKPART” again
13. Type “LIST”
14. Type “SELECT DISK 1” to select the second hard drive
15. Type “CLEAN”
16. Proceed to install Win 7 as usual. After you have cleaned up the drives you can partition them as you please.
17. This video helps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQf9YqbD8WI Installing Drivers
1. Alright so we are sitting in Win 7 and are excited that it works and all but it cannot recognize a single device in the Device Manager including the wireless card
2. If you go to the ASUS driver website you will see that there is no support for Win7 at all. Only a few Windows 8 drivers from the Asus website won't work on Win 7 and those are the wireless card, NVIDIA and USB 3 controller.
3. Installing the network adapter:
[INDENT=2]a. Win7 does not install any drivers for that particular adaptor so you won’t be able to hook up to the internet right away.
b. Download the following driver (google DR_PCE_AC66_6309526_Win7 and you’ll find a download spot)
c. Open device manager and go to your network device
d. Press the update driver and point to the location of this driver on your hard drive.
4. The following drivers from the ASUS website work with Win7 so just download them and install them:
[INDENT=2]a. Intel Chipset, ATK, Audio, LAN, Card Reader, Touchpad, Bluetooth, most of the Utilities (Thunderbolt, USB charger), Intel Management Interface and others
b. Get them at the official website:
https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ROG_G750JS/HelpDesk_Download/
5. Install the video card drivers
[INDENT=2]a. You will not be able to install the video card driver before you have installed 2 things:
[INDENT=3]i. The Intel chipset driver so make sure you install the Intel driver first (from step 4)
[INDENT=3]ii. The Intel 4600 VGA driver which you will get from windows updates. Open windows updates and in the optional updates you will find the Intel VGA update.
I also found the latest Intel driver here:
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23714〈=eng&OSVersion=Windows 7 (64-bit)*&DownloadType=Drivers
[INDENT=2]b. Go to nvidia and search for the GTX870M or whatever your card is.
c. As of May'14 there is an official driver 337.88 which is working perfectly.
6. Installing the USB 3 controller
[INDENT=2]a. Win 7 does not have native USB 3 support so if you don’t install any drivers you’ll be stuck with USB 2.
b. Just google the following driver and install it from Intel: USB 3.0 Driver: Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver for Intel® 8 Series/C220 Chipset Family
c. If your controller is from a different C2** family get that. For example it might be from the C216 family. You’ll see the exact name in your device manager before you download the driver.
d. You’ll know you have USB 3 support by seeing the Intel USB 3 extensible host controller in your device manager under the Universal Serial Bus Controllers. You will not be seeing any USB 3 controllers there before you install the drivers and your ports will be operating under USB 2. Download the USBTreeView program to verify the USB 3 functionality after you install the drivers if you want to.
