G74Sx Bios bricked - strange tech response

[denismx]

Just to bring closure to this thread...

I got my G74SX back from service. Instead of pulling out the eeprom and burning a new bios, I got a new motherboard completely. Guess it's faster this way.
Well, it booted to windows all right, but it came back crippled. No 3D and no backlight on keyboard. Took me something like 6 hours of fiddling to get the correct version of the NVidia drivers for the 3D part as the latest ones from NVidia bugged my laptop and a couple of hours to get the keyboard backlight to work again (used Chastity's method).

Not impressed by the intimidation attempts from the RMA phone clerk - but there was no charge in the end - and not impressed by the quality control of the service techs who send back a crippled laptop.

The storm seems passed. Back to fighting with my awsome laptop.

[BigRob_NH]

thanks for sharing your experience. I've been following as I used Easyflash to brick my G74sx on 6/2. I was able to pretty easily get an RMA that included shipping (from NH to CA, won't arrive till 6/11 as they went Fedex GROUND). On advice of the folks here I forwarded the RMA info to Mason who has already checked into things. He has observed that they've indicated Customer Induced Damage (CID). He said to track the shipping and when it arrives, let him know and he'll work with the techs on that CID issue.

This is sort of like health insurance. they deny first until you write/call in and complain. They're doing the same thing here. We have to be thankful for folks like Mason who are helping to stand behind their product.

This Easyflash issue is, really, unbelievably pathetic and is clearly costing them money.

Out of curiosity, did your new motherboard show up with BIOS 203 on it? I'm not entirely surprised that they saved .50 cents per MB to leave off a jtag header and resort to MB swap. I'd hate to go through all this and STILL have to do a BIOS update.

Regards,
Rob.

[denismx]

Rob,
The mobo came back with the most recent bios (203). I paid for the charges to send it in. Maybe that was the objectve of the intimidation over getting a RMA.

The laptop no longer had the keyboard lights working, like I said earlier. Just a note to say that when I applied rhe fixmykbd app (designed for another model) on my G74SX it camed back with an error mesage, but got the lights working on reboot. As for the 3D, don't use the drivers on the Nvidia web site but only the ones on the Asus web site as the latet Nvidia drivers are bugged on a G74.

It would be appreciated that you do the follow up so we know what was your experience with this.

As for me, I'm having a lot of fun with this beast now that all is working. Only thing left is to fix this "m" key lag that is sometimes annoying. I believe it's a matter of reinstalling some piece of software. No big deal.