Windows 10 upgrade experience for Asus G74SX 3d model -
- Pre-upgrade - Win 7 64-bit Home
Issues noticed -
* after installing a 1TB SSHD hybrid drive, the OS would hang/freeze after resuming from sleep and only a hard powercycle would bring it back
* high CPU/GPU temps (idle cpu = 65C, idle gpu=55C, under load cpu = 97C and thermal throttling always on cpu core 2, rest of cores around 95C, under load gpu = 85C. This is with GTA V - very high textures using 2.4GB VRAM)
* slow/sluggish response at times
* under intense game load, max cpu freq was always 2994MHz (x28)
Used a dust buster to clean the vents and temps dropped about 8C to 89C cpu under load, 79C GPU under load. (GTA V)
Idle temps dropped about 4C
_ Upgrade went smooth and took about 40mins.
- Post-upgrade - Win 10 64-bit Home
Benefits
* no more hangs after resuming from sleep.
* cpu/gpu temps are now strangely lower on their own. Idle cpu temp is now approx 40C cpu, 36C gpu. Max cpu temp is now 75C with GTA V, max gpu temp is now 71C. No other changes so this is very puzzling to me.
* the touchpad got enabled and I noticed the sentellic driver ver updated and it was just a matter of disabling. However, after each resume from sleep I have to unplug/replug mouse to disable touchpad each time like before. I will just disable entire touchpad again.
* hwinfo64 now reports x30-x31 boost when gaming. Max freq program shows is now 3093MHz (about 100MHz more than before under Win 7). This used to be x28 in Win 7
* Overall feel is very clean and nice. The laptop seems zippy. I'll be buying a 1TB Corsair SSD (I have 1TB SSHD and 750GB HDD) to speed it up vastly.
* Windows store is nice, MS Edge is actually very nice (but I'm sticking with my Opera Beta, best browser ever 😉
* Cortana is very nice. Bing is very well integrated and nice. Using this almost exclusively
Minor quibbles
* the default win 10 fonts all seem super tiny. Had to increase it a bit (making it bold makes it look real nice)
* scrollbars look like win 95 scroll bars for some reason
* where is solitaire? I used to like to play that before. It is missing? There's some ad filled Solitaire collection but no actual solitaire game.
* who installed candy crush? It seems to have installed by default.
* unable to disable bluetooth. Need to figure this out
* nvidia driver via geforce experience kept complaining "incompatible with this ver of windows and no compatible nvidia hw found". Had to manually force by downloading driver instead of geforce experience
* nvidia driver install required 2 reboots - one after it removed it, then rebooted and resumed and installed win 10 driver. There doesn't seem to be the feature which was there in Win 7 - install the new drivers without reboot
* The annoying UAC messages are all still there.
* battery status shows - 96% plugged in, not charging. Battery doesn't seem to be going to 100% anymore? each reboot is dropping it by 1%. But it seems to be ok for now. Maybe needs a better driver.
Overall after a couple of days, the experience is positive but I have a month still to roll back if needed.