I recently bought an Asus FX503VM notebook. Now, as a disclaimer, this was intended to be my first real venture into PC gaming, as the computer I had before this was a kind of crappy cheap laptop I bought years ago for college. I did do some homework while shopping around, but that was mostly on comparing what was out there at my budget level, so if I sound pretty clueless, I apologize, the finer details are all still pretty uncharted territory to me.

When I got the new laptop out of the box, it seemed to start fine, but I noticed during Windows 10 setup that Cortana had a lot of crackling and popping going on, and figured I'd have to update the audio drivers or something. When it got to the desktop, I was immediately prompted to restart the computer for critical updates. One of those "if you don't do this we'll do it for you in a few minutes" kind of prompts if I recall correctly. I didn't think much of it, being the initial setup and all, so I let it go ahead and shut down. It got about 40% of the way through a BIOS update, and then just...didn't go any further. I actually let it sit like that for about 45 minutes, unsure how long it was supposed to take, but eventually, after checking online and not really finding anything helpful, I called Asus support and they had me turn it off. And it never turned back on again. The AC light and keyboard backlighting would come on, but nothing else would. It wouldn't even boot into safe mode, which the guy on the support line had me holding a key to attempt for a full ten minutes.

I chose to send it back through Newegg instead of Asus, figuring it was free shipping and less hassle on my part, and now I'm waiting on a replacement. My question now is, with the way this one died during an update rather than refusing to boot in the first place or something more obviously hardware-related, whether I can write this off as just a bad part, or whether it's something the replacement might be at risk for as well. From what I've read since, I know crashing during the BIOS update can brick it, but even then I have to wonder what caused it to crash. That's something I might expect from my old laptop, but I would hope not from one with these specs, fresh out of the box. It was only on for maybe ten minutes during the Windows setup before that update, so I didn't really get the chance to test it out much to see if there were any other noticeable problems beforehand besides the audio crackling. I know it's likely I'm being paranoid, but it's not exactly an encouraging start to my PC gaming career and I've got nothing better to do while I wait for the replacement, so I figured I'd try to investigate a bit. See what people who know a bit more than me think about it. Sorry I don't have more details from the computer itself, this kind of blindsided me.


Here's what I know for the support template, based on what the laptop was supposed to be, since I didn't get to really check it out much:

Bios version: Unsure

CPU: i5 7300HQ 2.5GHz

Memory amount in GB: 8GB

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

SSD/HDDs/Optical drives: 128GB M.2 SSD + 1TB HDD, no optical drive

AC Adapter: Original

Operating system: Original ASUS factory image or clean install? Microsoft Activated yes/no? Original factory image, no Microsoft



Drivers Installed (include version and especially any non-ASUS approved notebook drivers): Whatever was on it from the factory

Any third Party temp/voltage software installed: no

System Overclocked (provide details)? no

Any hardware upgraded? no


Thanks!