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Hegemon · ‎05-13-2014

Just bought the midrange G750JS on April 7th and had some pretty difficult 10 hours installing Win 7 and having all drivers to work and all so wanted to share it with you guys. The good news is that you can make it all work just perfectly fine. I've been playing a lot of games and doing video editing on win 7.

I am a fan of clean installs – new installation on a freshly formatted PC. That’s what I did to my very first generation RoG (was it the G63?) that I bought back in 2010 and still runs perfectly with no need to format for 4 years and no firewalls/antivirus crap on it.

First of all installing a clean Win 7 will most likely wipe everything INCLUDING THE RECOVERY PARTITION and I will explain why later, so I recommend using the ASUS Backtracker to get your recovery partition off your hard drive and onto a USB drive. For some reason ASUS put the recovery on the SSD drive where every GB counts. This way you’ll free up 20GB there and it is worth it anyway.
ASUS Backtracker: http://www.asus.com/supportonly/ASUS_Backtracker/

BIOS settings:

1. Restart your computer, hit F2 and enter BIOS.

2. Go to your Security tab, go the Secure Boot and DISABLE it.
3. GO back to the Boot tab and ENABLE both Launch CSM and Launch PXE OpROM.
4. Exit and Save settings and upon restart hit F2 to enter bios again.
5. Under the Boot tab you will now see the options to select to boot from the DVD Rom or other devices. Use the + / - to change the boot priority. If you want to boot from a USB, plug it in your computer and restart again and you will see it there as well.

Installing Win 7

1. You might think this is trivial but with the new UEFI bioses it is not as easy as it used to be.
2. If you try to install it the regular way, upon selecting a partition you’ll get the following message: “Windows cannot be installed to this disk the selected disk is of the GPT partition style.”
3. Hit cancel and go back in the Windows installer (or restart the PC and start anew) to the screen where you get to hit the “Install Now” in the middle of the screen.
4. Hit F10 and you’ll go to the console.
5. Type “DISKPART”
6. Type “LIST”
7. Type “SELECT DISK 0”
8. Type “CLEAN”
9. Type “CONVERT MBR”
10. This will clean up the drive of all partitions including the Recovery partition. It will delete everything. Converting to MBR is really important especially if you’ll need to activate windows later (activators won’t work if you don’t do that).
11. YOU NEED TO REPEAT THE OPERATION FOR ALL HARD DRIVES INSTALLED OR WIN 7 FREAKS OUT AND WON”T INSTALL.
12. Type “DISKPART” again
13. Type “LIST”
14. Type “SELECT DISK 1” to select the second hard drive
15. Type “CLEAN”
16. Proceed to install Win 7 as usual. After you have cleaned up the drives you can partition them as you please.
17. This video helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQf9YqbD8WI

Installing Drivers

1. Alright so we are sitting in Win 7 and are excited that it works and all but it cannot recognize a single device in the Device Manager including the wireless card
2. If you go to the ASUS driver website you will see that there is no support for Win7 at all. Only a few Windows 8 drivers from the Asus website won't work on Win 7 and those are the wireless card, NVIDIA and USB 3 controller.

3. Installing the network adapter:

[INDENT=2]a. Win7 does not install any drivers for that particular adaptor so you won’t be able to hook up to the internet right away.
b. Download the following driver (google DR_PCE_AC66_6309526_Win7 and you’ll find a download spot)
c. Open device manager and go to your network device
d. Press the update driver and point to the location of this driver on your hard drive.

4. The following drivers from the ASUS website work with Win7 so just download them and install them:

[INDENT=2]a. Intel Chipset, ATK, Audio, LAN, Card Reader, Touchpad, Bluetooth, most of the Utilities (Thunderbolt, USB charger), Intel Management Interface and others
b. Get them at the official website: https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ROG_G750JS/HelpDesk_Download/

5. Install the video card drivers

[INDENT=2]a. You will not be able to install the video card driver before you have installed 2 things:

[INDENT=3]i. The Intel chipset driver so make sure you install the Intel driver first (from step 4)
[INDENT=3]ii. The Intel 4600 VGA driver which you will get from windows updates. Open windows updates and in the optional updates you will find the Intel VGA update.
I also found the latest Intel driver here:
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23714〈=eng&OSVersion=Windows 7 (64-bit)*&DownloadType=Drivers
[INDENT=2]b. Go to nvidia and search for the GTX870M or whatever your card is.
c. As of May'14 there is an official driver 337.88 which is working perfectly.

6. Installing the USB 3 controller

[INDENT=2]a. Win 7 does not have native USB 3 support so if you don’t install any drivers you’ll be stuck with USB 2.
b. Just google the following driver and install it from Intel: USB 3.0 Driver: Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver for Intel® 8 Series/C220 Chipset Family
c. If your controller is from a different C2** family get that. For example it might be from the C216 family. You’ll see the exact name in your device manager before you download the driver.
d. You’ll know you have USB 3 support by seeing the Intel USB 3 extensible host controller in your device manager under the Universal Serial Bus Controllers. You will not be seeing any USB 3 controllers there before you install the drivers and your ports will be operating under USB 2. Download the USBTreeView program to verify the USB 3 functionality after you install the drivers if you want to.

Switch108 · ‎05-20-2014

I have G750 JS but no "Secure boot" and "Launch CSM" options in bios; only "Launch PXE OpRom". Maybe because I allready have Win 8.1 installed ? Any ideas?

dilucca · ‎05-22-2014

On 750JZ i also didnt have that boot options. However, I bought version without OS. Win7 works fine. Only power4gear, and card reader, and usb drivers wont work.

Hegemon · ‎05-27-2014

dilucca wrote:
On 750JZ i also didnt have that boot options. However, I bought version without OS. Win7 works fine. Only power4gear, and card reader, and usb drivers wont work.

That's great. For me the Power4Gear did work and the card reader has native Win 7 support so no need to install any drivers. As to the USB 3 support the guide is right up there in the opening post or you'll be running all USB ports on USB 2.0 instead of 3.0

Caustic · ‎05-27-2014

I own a G750JZ. I backed up Win 8.1 to a USB Drive tonight and installed 7 Home Premium x64, because I own a large volume of software that wasn't working with 8.1.

I was able to install 7, but went about it a slightly different way. instead of using your route of F10 to redo the partition, I went into the Advanced drive options and deleted every drive, partition, etc. From there, I picked the 200gig SSD partition and hit "next" and it installed on the RAID 0 SSD without issue.

I still have both Launch CSM and Launch PXE OpROM set to ENABLE. Can one or both be turned off after the install? Is there a detailed explanation as to what these do?

During the POST, after the RAID Drive array displays, there is a 2 second pause with unreadable red text characters at the top of the screen through a Blue bar - it almost looks like it could be an unsupported language, and it is generally where the Network Boot portion of the POST screen displays.

Did anyone else run into that? If needed, I can get a screen shot. I can life with it, but it looks rough on such an expensive laptop. I'd rather almost not even see the POST screen, and go back to the default Asus screen, but when I screwed around with the CSM and PXE, windows wouldn't boot, and I'm guessing that's to be expected.

This newer bios is a bit confusing.

Hegemon · ‎05-27-2014

Hi Caustic,

It seems to me the blue bar with the red text is raid-related. Personally, I do not have a raid configuration but if anyone else does, please share your thoughts with us. This is interesting. The fact that this is happening during the POST leads me to believe it has something to do with the raid but personally I don't have a lot of experience with raids.

I can confirm that without the CSM and the PXE Win 7 doesn't boot and I believe the reason for that is the MBR boot which isn't supported in the newer UEFI modes. I think what you did there is manually clean every drive which is a smart way to go and should lead to the same result.

I do not care about leaving CSM and PXE on (I don't even know what they do lol), since with all tweaks my Win 7 boots much faster than Win 8 did on the same PC. I get into Google search on my Chrome within 15 sec of a cold start and this involves tweaks like disabling Win startup GUI and having a very careful selection of startup programs and no log-in. I am very happy with that.

This here is a good explanation of the difference between the new UEFI and classical BIOS, with the main difference being that old BIOS supports HDDs of up to 2.2TB and the new EUFI - up to 9.4 zettabytes whatever this might be:

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/UEFI-vs-BIOs-in-Windows-8-for-desktop-startup

Hegemon · ‎05-27-2014

So you guys are saying that after you disable the secure boot you only see the PXE OpRom.

That's strange but it should also work this way. Did you try to install Win 7 with just that option?

pokerface · ‎05-27-2014

you don't need to enable Launch PXE OpROM

that's only for booting off a network! all you need is to disable secure boot and fast boot (since those are for Windows 😎 then enable CMS then install will go just fine

if you boot off the installation media in GPT mode, then the disks must be formatted in GPT, if you booted off the installation media in non-UEFI mode, then you need MBR

simple as that

ALIENWARE 18 Laptop
CPU: Intel Core i7-4900MQ CPU @ 3.8 GHz (8MB Cache)
Graphics: Dual GeForce GTX 780M SLI 2x4 GB GDDR5 RAM
Sound: Realtek ALC668 HD Audio with Klipsch Speakers
Memory: 32 GB Kingston HyperX 1866 MHz DDR3 PC3-14900 RAM
Storage: Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSD + Samsung 850 PRO 1 TB SSD + Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB mSATA SSD
Screen: Samsung LTM184HL01 18.4" WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display PLS 16:9 1080p [SDC4C48]
OS: Windows 8.1 (x64)

Hegemon · ‎05-27-2014

pokerface wrote:
you don't need to enable Launch PXE OpROM

that's only for booting off a network! all you need is to disable secure boot and fast boot (since those are for Windows 😎 then enable CMS then install will go just fine

if you boot off the installation media in GPT mode, then the disks must be formatted in GPT, if you booted off the installation media in non-UEFI mode, then you need MBR

simple as that

Thanks, this is helpful. I was wondering what PXE is all about. I would like to confirm the bit about GPT - I did 2 Win 7 installations - one in GPT mode and one in MBR ( reformatted the drive in MBR) and both worked fine.

pokerface · ‎05-27-2014

Hegemon wrote:
Thanks, this is helpful. I was wondering what PXE is all about. I would like to confirm the bit about GPT - I did 2 Win 7 installations - one in GPT mode and one in MBR ( reformatted the drive in MBR) and both worked fine.

MBR is an ancient system. In the past, System Imaging problems had problem backing up GPT partitions but that is all gone now. Macrium Reflect Free can easily back up a GPT partition.

Although GPT partitions bring 2TB+ partition support which most of us don't need. it also takes a second or two off your boot time since it's faster to access during boot up.

I have all my partitions on all my disks formatted in GPT, including my external 3 TB Western Digital USB drive. I like to have all my drives in uniformity as in, one file system / partition mode

If you want to do that without formatting and losing your data, download MiniTool Partition Wizard free it can do the job without losing your data

ALIENWARE 18 Laptop
CPU: Intel Core i7-4900MQ CPU @ 3.8 GHz (8MB Cache)
Graphics: Dual GeForce GTX 780M SLI 2x4 GB GDDR5 RAM
Sound: Realtek ALC668 HD Audio with Klipsch Speakers
Memory: 32 GB Kingston HyperX 1866 MHz DDR3 PC3-14900 RAM
Storage: Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB SSD + Samsung 850 PRO 1 TB SSD + Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB mSATA SSD
Screen: Samsung LTM184HL01 18.4" WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display PLS 16:9 1080p [SDC4C48]
OS: Windows 8.1 (x64)

How to install Windows 7 on G750JS, G750JM and G750JZ