Should I repair/restore a beast laptop?

[shambles1980]

Worth a try. Always good fun disassembling a laptop.

I HATE pulling apart a laptop lol. it is my idea of hell..
No matter what im trying to get at EVERYTHING has to come off including the monitor.
i hate the things lol..

As for the OP question.
I would fixer it up. its always useful to have a decent laptop laying around for some reason or another.

 

[AlienALX]

OK guys so here is where I am at. Due to (I think) a lack of football this weekend I will be continuing my work and getting it all finished up.

So this is what I have. It's an Asus G73SW. At retail this thing was well over two grand.



If you take a look at the back you can see how it extends out with the most enormous set of vents I have ever seen on a laptop.



OK. So here is the laptop "as is" taken out of a storage drawer under out bed.



It was absolutely rotten. And what it looks like open.



It took me about an hour of cleaning and using some cutting compound to get it back into pristine condition. I think I was a little unfair on my wife tbh. I think she took much better care of this than her old laptop. Any way, here is the SSD I found in a box. It's basically a MSATA drive in a 2.5" adapter shell. It's only 60gb but I can't upgrade the laptop to either 8 or 10 because Asus did not make any drivers, so it's strictly 7 only and with Hiberfil.sys gone and back up disabled the OS weighs in at around 20gb.



Time to take a look inside.



And then fit the drives I wanted. 60gb SSD, 750gb high performance drive that came in the laptop.



Time to boot. It works !



And now for the most nerve racking part.. Would the SSD detect in there?



Thank god ! So.. A few hours later and 18 drivers installed (this thing is a nightmare.. So much hardware crammed into it !)



As I said, tomorrow I will be finishing the install (all of the drivers are done) and installing all of the things I use including Steam, HWMON and so on. For a laugh I'll even bench it with 3DMark and 3DM11. I will be paying close attention to the temps as I do so and I'm hoping the TIM in there is still OK. If it is? this laptop is absolutely gorgeous. I reckon it's still easily worth £350 but I will be keeping it to watch my dodgy football channels on on Saturdays and Sundays. Much comfier on the sofa

 

[Tolemac]

Kudos fella

 

[shambles1980]

"paste" is probably "ok" but i would change it as a matter of fact.
Im using "paste" because i dont think they used what I would call thermal paste, and i say "ok" because i dont think it will be much worse now than when it was new.
But should probably be "fine" unless you notice "issues".
(now im just using " " because i started to earlier)

 

[AlienALX]

Annoyingly you can actually see one of the contact plates inside the ram/drive bay. Sadly you can't repaste it from there though, the whole assembly needs to come out.

I've been thinking about buying a laptop for ages now. I didn't have the heart to ask my wife for the Asus so I was going to get a pile of crap just to watch streams on. In the end she said I could have it, so it's not going to see any hard use and I doubt I will ever even load up a game on it.

Why would I? I have a killer 4k gaming set up.

 

[Bullmecha]

I have an old Asus ROG G73JH, first gen I7 i believe with a HD5870 in it. It cranks along fine with most of my Steam games and all of my office crap for the house.
As far as the GPU heat, it's insane even after a cleaning and a repaste. Not sure what temps are now but it doesn't ever overheat or any issues with the screen, of course I don't pound everything I can out of it while gaming.

BTW, I do have 10 installed on mine but haven't really got into it that much yet. Might go have a go at benchmarks or something this weekend.

 

[AlienALX]

Hi. Thanks for the post, very informative !

I decided to benchmark the laptop using 3DMark Firestrike and although it barely hit 10 FPS the GPU temps were actually very good. It maxed out at 64c, which is not very high so I'm guessing the TIM is fine

I would risk putting 10 on it in all honesty but my SSD is only 60gb so I'm worried it would not be big enough. Windows 7 absolutely roars along perfectly so I'm a bit cautious.

I would need to buy a bigger SSD really and even then I'm not sure all of the hardware would be compatible with it..

I'm only going to be using it at weekends to stream Football (soccer) games on any way really so anything more is rather pointless.

 

[The_Mard]

Heyyo,

Meh, stick with Windows 7 tbh. The only real point as a gamer to even put Windows 10 on that notebook would be DirectX 12 games... and there's not even a single one out yet lol. Right now? you'd get no performance gains and there's no security advantage yet since Windows 7 is still within security support phase of its life. Stick with what works for now and snag your free upgrade before the end of July 2016 for those extra five years of security updates and you'll be fine.

Those temps are actually really impressive for a notebook with a full sized GPU tbh. I'd leave it like that... but if you're that inclined to redo the thermal paste? What I always do is make a screw map. Three or four diagrams to show top, under keyboard, under first bezel and bottom. Then I'd get some clear ziplock bags and number them. Every time you remove a new screw? Write on the map the number and toss it into the appropriate bag. I sometimes even drew out stuff like the battery mounting point if there was multiple screws on the inside and outside of it to ensure proper placement. Used to replace heatsinks and fans a lot on notebooks back when I was a full time computer technician.