Help with G73jh

[jwayne42]

Hey guys, first time posting on here I think it's long past due and would appreciate any insight someone can provide for me. If anyone could send me a PM or post here with possible suggestions that would be solid. If it was acceptable we could trade emails and then go from there too, anyway just had some questions.

I want to start off by saying I am sort of tech savvy so you won't be dealing with someone that has no clue on how things work.

My current problems are as of follows:
Grey bar screen, usually happens when I play on Blizzard Products? I generally don't see this error much anymore. Especially on other MMO's like Rift and SWTOR. I have heard a lot of rumors circling around this with a vbios update. Last year I had sent my unit in when it was covered the ASUS 12month joke coverage. Turns out about a 7 week time table! I will admit that performance has increased and been a little better - I am fully aware high performance electronics have their problems, so I guess I shouldn't blame the entire horrifying experience with ASUS customer service on the laptop.

Every now and then I will restart and turn on my laptop from being shut down and my HDD powers up but the display remains in a dark state. As in no power going to the monitor..generally I just unplug and remove the battery and hold down the power button for 5 secs to give it a nice wipe. That has worked 100% of the time so far, I am wondering if it's something I am doing, or could I be looking a possible hardware failure in the future?

As far as it goes right now I have had minimal issues in the past two months. This is rare because since I have had this laptop from Dec of 2010 I have had nothing but a headache of problems so here is my final question:

Is there a list of programs/drivers/updates that I should be running or checking quite frequently? I generally don't have any problems with heat as I keep my playing surface flawless. I have done some searching on the forums and looked over a few of the threads that Chastity had made a post. I'll give an example of a frustration, updating my video drivers and the current driver not compatible with what ASUS was running and changed my display to 800x600 - I called their support and was instructed to download the one from their website which was almost two years old. When I brought that to the agent's attention he just told me they are "Working on it." I know for a fact this can't be the only option. Again all I am asking is just a small list and possibly directions on how to monitor these small annoyances. This particular model has been out for a long time and hopefully most of the bugs/issues are fixed!

Any help would be solid! Just shoot me a PM with a "must haves" or something on here would work. I plan on checking in around here quite frequently.

Thanks again,

Andy

[xeromist]

Have you done the vBIOS update? I'd recommend it based on your various display issues.

[dstrakele]

jwayne42 wrote:
Every now and then I will restart and turn on my laptop from being shut down and my HDD powers up but the display remains in a dark state. As in no power going to the monitor..generally I just unplug and remove the battery and hold down the power button for 5 secs to give it a nice wipe. That has worked 100% of the time so far, I am wondering if it's something I am doing, or could I be looking a possible hardware failure in the future?

From what I've seen in these forums, discharging the EC to resolve a "boot to black screen" issue is only a temporary fix for a hardware issue.

The list of drivers you need to monitor is very short. Your issues are video related, so I recommend updating your vbios as recommended by @xeromist and then see what the latest video drivers will do for you. I recommend cleanly uninstalling your current video drivers from Control Panel and installing the new video driver from within Windows Safe Mode to disable other running drivers (such as Antivirus) that may interfere with your video driver installation.

You should monitor the CPU and GPU temperatures of your gaming system. HWIINFO64 will do that for you and more... Monitor the threads on this forum for more interesting and useful information.

[reID_entify]

+1 vbios update