I know it has been more than four months since the most recent reply, but I just wanted to follow up on my extreme unhappiness with this machine. I am the original poster.
+ I bought the computer in late July and installed an SSD to remedy the performance issues. This worked for a while.
+ A month later, my wireless adapter stopped working. I eventually replaced it with a USB-based wireless adapter.
+ A week later, I realized that the bluetooth capability no longer worked. Makes sense... they're part of the same unit.
+ A few weeks later, the computer stopped booting up altogether. Ultimately, I realized that the problem was a defective SSD, so I replaced it with yet another Samsung SSD. This seemed to have worked because I was at least able to reinstall the OS and get Steam working.
+ For some reason, I have never been able to reinstall Office and the Adobe CC on this computer. (I have legitimate installation files for both of these things, and have installed these products and their predecessors dozens of times on different machines.) It's the weirdest thing: I can install all sorts of applications downloaded from sites like Ninite, but these two installers just won't work. Oddly, the installers work on my older Asus machine just fine. But this might not be a hardware problem, so I'm just mentioning it as an outlier.
+ Most recently, the USB ports on one side of the machine have stopped working. Since I use the USB port for my wireless adapter because the built-in adapter has failed, this is a problem.
So why not just send it back to Asus? I will try to do this, but there are two issues: a) I did open up the machine and install a new SSD, so they might try to claim that it was my fault and that I somehow screwed it up, and b) I'm not sure if it is still under warranty since I bought it in July.
I would have been much more proactive about getting the laptop fixed, but this is really just my gaming machine that I occasionally use for lecture preparation and grading papers if I'm home sick or something. So I only get a chance to interact with the machine every once in a while. But that doesn't make its suckiness any less annoying. It was an expensive birthday present from my wife, and now it's little more than a paperweight.
Asus machines have always worked for me in the past, so I'm not swearing off all future Asus purchases. I know that *all* manufacturers have a certain number of lemons in every run. No matter how much QA testing takes place, they can't test every single machine. I just ended up with a crappy one.
So what have I learned from all of this? I've learned that I will never again buy a computer with a crappy hard drive and choose to upgrade its innards on my own. I don't think I did anything to damage the system. I've installed SSD's in other machines that were much more tricky (e.g. a 2012 Macbook Pro and a 2014 Acer) and managed to avoid damaging those systems. But if I had just paid a bit extra for the model with the SSD, fixing any problems would have been a piece of cake. I could have just contacted Asus, waited for the RMA label, and sent it off for repairs.
If anyone has any advice about next steps and how I might go about trying to fix this lemon, I would be grateful. I've already thrown good money after bad, now spending close to $1600 on the machine when you factor in the two SSD drives.
