I recently purchased an Asus G73JH, to replace the ageing and dilapidated Sony Vaio AR21S that I’d had for a few years. The idea behind the Asus was that it’s a very powerful unit, comes with a 2 year warranty, and will serve as an excellent test bed for 64-bit applications in the business. Over about a month of testing, it’s provided us with some valuable data and enabled us to start using 64-bit software, including powerful mapping and video packages that can make good use of the 8GB of RAM in the unit. We were also able to find out well in advance of any issues with commonly used software, such as the Cisco VPN client (now available in 64-bit, but only very recently). Printer drivers were quite a hurdle, but have mostly now been sorted out.Over the Sony, it certainly increased my productivity. The battery life was much better, allowing me to use it on my commute on the train, and the built-in webcam and microphone is handy for communicating either using messenger packages, skype, or webex conferencing. Due to the performance and large memory, I’m also able to run up to 5 virtual machines at the same time. I currently have two virtual servers (Server 2008 R2), one XP SP3, and one Win7 virtual machine. The XP machine allows me to use old legacy apps, and the win7 is a useful testbed. The servers are very useful for testing as well, and using as a “mobile” domain controller for setting up or troubleshooting remote sites.
Unfortunately, yesterday (14 June), the screen on the Asus faulted, as you can see from the photo. It’s a common enough fault, according to a few forums. I’d already filled out the registration on the Asus site for the two year warranty, and I’ve now contacted Corine this morning (15 June) at the Asus warranty team. Asus have asked for images of the faulty screen, to determine whether it’s a warranty issue or not. Standard procedure, I expect. I’ve also contacted Asus UK via twitter, but haven’t had a response yet.
Given how new the machine is, I’m expecting a replacement unit to be delivered, so I can swap out the drives and send the faulty one back. If Asus insist on repairing the unit, I’ll simply ask for a refund instead, and (sadly) look for an alternative notebook. I’m interested to see how Asus perform at the warranty process, as for such a tech-savvy operation, I’d expect them to get on top of technical faults like this pretty sharply. Asus aren’t a massive volume, cheap manufacturer – quite the opposite – so they need to look after their clients. If you buy a Packard Bell from PC World, you might expect warranty issues to be rather slow and drawn out, but not with Asus.
Just spoke to Asus again. Although it looks like a hardware fault, and there are others with the same problem, they need to see the unit, and most likely simply repair it. The repair application process takes four working days, and the average turnaround for a repair is 10 working days. Not really good enough, in my opinion, so I’m approaching our suppliers to see if they can get us a replacement unit and have the faulty one sent back for a refund.
Quite a number of people with the same problem:
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20100425153143000&board_id=3&model=G73JH&page=1&SLanguage=en-us
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=13&model=LS201&id=20100603232118781&page=1&SLanguage=en-us
I had anticipated that once the machine was installed on my wireless network employing my desktop, that our laptops on the network could merely discover it and append it with the Windows Add Printer service, if all they required was print capability–maybe by grabbing a little driver off the internet or from the machine itself. But oh, no. This thing has to be established from the disk for each machine, and required 20 moments from each one to set up on our XP laptops, and almost 30 minutes on our VISTA machine. The useless completion bar sat at 94% for most of that time.