My thots being a G74SX owner for about 5 weeks now:
Pros: Solid built and heavy machine: a real desktop replacement with fast processor and graphics. Beefy hinge and nice rubber coating for non-slip wrist-rest. Awesome screen (1920x1080 FHD LED). Incredibly comfortable and spacious keyboard. Very quiet.
Cons: Useless BIOS: no control over anything relevant to performance (e.g. no RAID) or power (e.g no ACPI) really. Mediocre battery life (3 hours). No backup BIOS, meaning a bad flash dooms your machine to RMA. Slightly crippled CPU (does not reach full 2.9 GHz Turbo speed in Windows 7) which also throttles itself downwards when you drive it reasonably hard (but not overly so). All extra hotkeys for backlit KB, screen brightness, calculator button, power profiles, etc are software controlled, meaning you are constrained to using windows to get those features.
On my own G74SX-CST1 the first thing I did was burn a recovery DVD. Then I downloaded Hiren's BootCD, Windows 7, and the ASUS eDriver disk, both of which Chastity linked in the Sticky threads for this forum. The rest is easy: boot Hirens, remake the partitions on your drives the way you like them and get rid of the 25 GB "hidden" partition containing the recovery install (that you just backed up), install Windows 7 HP, and stick in the DVD with the ASUS drivers. Install only the ones you want. Finally, activate Windows using the product key on the sticker on the underside of the notebook.
Takes a couple hours, but its worth it: there is no trace of the polluteware that ASUS installs on there, your registry is clean, primed and unfragmented (uninstalling via control panel always leaves ghost garbage in your registry), and you have the disk partitioned the way you want, having recovered space from the hidden partition.
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G74SX-CST1-CBIL, i7 2630QM 2GHz
32GB DDR3 RAM @1333MHz
GTX560M 3GB DDR5 (192 bit)
17.3" LED 1920x1080
Sentelic TP, BIOS 203
Debian Linux Wheezy (Testing) Kernel 3.2, NVIDIA 295.40