How to install Windows 7 on G750JS, G750JM and G750JZ

[Hegemon]

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.

[dmon04]

Hello
I bought a ASUS G750JZ-DS71 17.3" ROG Laptop from US
it came with a win 8.1
after the first few days i just cant used to it and decided to follow this guide and reinstall my old win 7.

everything went fine expect a (problem?) after restarting/turning on
Its start to boot the dvdrom (and no dvd inside), then i get some weird red bar on the top of the screen
i better post some pictures, so after i turn on i see this:

and the red bars on the top of the screen:


it may be because i changed the Boot setting in the BIOS?
sorry im not very good with computers and now im scared that i messed something up...
can someone help please?

[Caustic]

dmon04 wrote:

and the red bars on the top of the screen:

I wish I knew what caused the bars. I want to clean it up and get rid of them, but they seem to be purely cosmetic, as I haven't noticed any performance issues.

I have since upgraded to an MSI GT80S Titan, so I'll be prepping my G750JZ for sale, and I am debating on going back to Windows 8.1/10 or not. Are Asus image disks available if I want to go back to a factory image?

[spartak_rog]

Hi!
I've tried to use your ISO for creating a pen drive to install windows 7 on ASUS ROG G752VS,
The ISO is invalid i used Windows USB Installation Tool, and Rufus, the ISO is corrupted.

Can you upload a fix ISO from your Installation USB please?

I'm having difficulties to Install W7 on ASUS ROG G752VS, 7700K?
Any help is welcomed

[Angrydroid4]

i got windows 7 to install no problem but i can not access the internet theres no lan or wifi i went to the asus web site and downloaded the wifi drivers but none worked i see your link is to the same site with all the same downloads but none work when i install them what am i doing wrong?? i ahjte windows 8 ive been trying to clone mywin 8 to my new SSD but thats just not working. so i installed my pirated version of win 7 ultimate it installed perfect of course had to disable secre-boot and enable "CSM" etc... before it worked but can niot get the internet to work. so your saying to use windows 7 i have to do all the stuff you stated above?? geeezzzzz what a pain in the ass lol FMl

[Greatwhitewing]

Angrydroid4 wrote:
i got windows 7 to install no problem but i can not access the internet theres no lan or wifi i went to the asus web site and downloaded the wifi drivers but none worked i see your link is to the same site with all the same downloads but none work when i install them what am i doing wrong?? i ahjte windows 8 ive been trying to clone mywin 8 to my new SSD but thats just not working. so i installed my pirated version of win 7 ultimate it installed perfect of course had to disable secre-boot and enable "CSM" etc... before it worked but can niot get the internet to work. so your saying to use windows 7 i have to do all the stuff you stated above?? geeezzzzz what a pain in the ass lol FMl

I used the Asus supplied drivers with Broadcom wireless adapter and worked well this time unlike the original work arounds before Asus posted the drivers. Maybe you don't have the right drivers?

[The_Gunslinger]

Just installed Windows 7 Pro (64bit) on a G750JM

Followed the guides above to a certain point, but wanted the GPT setup instead of MBR, so i used diskpart to clean the drives (SSD+HDD) then set to GPT on both and then installed.

First attempt went pear-shaped because Windows 7 has no native USB 3 drivers, and the G750 has only USB 3 ports.... Doh!

Second attempt (from DVD) seemed to go ok, but it seemed a little odd, because at the time of install, i'd selected the SSD to install on, but, it had put what looked like an MBR boot sector on the 750GB HDD, with the System OS partition on the SSD, which was interesting given that the second drive was not initialised.

Third attempt, this time ensuring both drives set to GPT, and the SSD being the last one set active/selected in diskpart, this time things seem to be right, i have an efi partition on the SSD, and the OS and a small unallocated part (overprovisioning) .... although, i'm not sure if the BitLocker Drive Encryption Feature makes use of the efi part or not, if not then that option may not be available on this install... meh, not important !

One odd thing i did notice, that might explain the issues i had at first (not withstanding the usb3 driver isseue) is that my HDD seems to be connected as Drive 0 and my SSD as Drive 1 which might explain some of the BIOS faffing around i had at first in regards to boot priority, got it stuck at one point booting to nothing lol !

So, once installed, i got the BIOS updated, and then eventually set the options as i wanted/needed, one thing i did do was to crank up the iGPU memory allocation to the full fat 512mb, other than that, I left the BIOS settings pretty much alone, i don't like the boot order/priority setup in this BIOS, it's horid !

Now for the Driver/Utilities fun.... omg, what a pain in the rear !!.....

oddly enough, no issues with the MaxxAudio thing, unlike others had reported, and i did not install the GPU Tweek thing as it wont be needed, and it seems there is no ideal solution for this laptop, and i did not install the Intel Xtreme tuning utility, no need for it for this machine's intended use.

Other than that, i installed as much as i could, as you would expect if it was OEM, and here's a couple of findings.....

1. the Power4Gear Hybrid Utility does nothing but make the windows power options look pretty, and add a couple of extra profiles in there to confuse matters!
2. the ASUS Live Update Utility, yeah.... i haven't exactly worked out what this things purpose is.... dunno whether it's a duplicate of the windows update for hardware or what, perhaps it seems useless because i started with all the latest files installed.
3. ASUS Wireless Switch (Wireless Console3) Utility - this could be handy for disabling the wifi/bluetooth independently of each other, and a quick visual confirmation.
4. the Splendid Utility..... yup, Splendid Useless.... fast way to switch display colour toning, like i said not exactly exciting.
5. the Keyboard filter stuff is useful, it makes the shortcut keys work
6. the Charger Plus thing could be useful.
7. Killer WLAN .... OMG, what a f****** mess !! - worst set of drivers and utility that i have ever come across.

I had some major issues with the bluetooth side of the combo card, it took me a good number of attempts to get this to install properly, and to get the right suite for it, although i say "suite" with gritted teeth, because i see no suite software !!
During instlal it constantly triggers windows driver install failed messages, because it seems to be on the USB hub somehow and it causes discont warnings while it's drivers are removed/installed, causing windows to try and inject generic ones, it doesn't help much that the camera drivers drops intel bluetooth related drivers in there as well, and even now i have one part that "can't start" according to device manager, but as that is "Bluetooth Server" and i don't think that will ever be needed, i'm not wasting any more time on it !
The WiFi was not much better, the drivers went in ok, but the killer software crap simply was a nightmare too, then i got the one from the main site and it was missing wifi section in it, then the latest simply refused to list any applications.... grrrr, mess, flakey and a really bad first experience with killer networking, back to intel next time for me, oh, and why Killer WLAN on these machines, yet no Killer LAN NIC ????

Then there's the asus site, Windows 8 downloads has loads more files than Windows 7, especially in the utilities section, poor lazy ass attempt at populating the sections, which is shocking given that the machine comes with no driver discs

So, for those of you that might find it useful, here's the ISO file of my Win7 x64 bit driver install disc, for the G750JM model

http://www.mediafire.com/download/p36kyfg53tlgamc/ASUS_G750JM_Win7_x64_Files.iso

and here a screenshot of the files/folders in it......




hopefully it'll be of some use to the next person looking to fresh install Windows 7 on a G750JM