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Being a reviewer sometimes means that you will accept a machine which has been somewhere else beforehand, its how the industry works and part of our job to work around any minor issues as best as possible. In this case however we were slightly alarmed by the state of the machine on arrival. The laptop itself was slotted between two ill fitting pieces of cardboard for instance without a protective sleeve around it, which meant that it was moving during transit. The above image shows one of the rear ports has several broken plastic vents.
We would be confident in saying that a retail machine bought from an online store would arrive with much better shipping protection. At least we would hope so.
We also noticed that there were over 40 applications installed and that the version of Windows had expired when we received it. It is often that review machines are sent out with 30 day trial licenses. We clearly received it after this 30 day expiration date, or the previous reviewer wiped the hard drive and installed his own trial operating system, which expired.
We noticed that only one hard drive was reported, even though we saw two were installed after removing the rear panel. After checking within ‘diskmgmt.msc' we noticed that the second drive was not even formatted. We had hoped that these drives might be installed in a Raid 0 configuration with a partitioned storage drive, but alas not. We are not sure if a previous reviewer deleted this partition for security reasons, but didn't have much time to investigate further.
Our first goal was to sort out the operating system disaster and as there was no restore partition or DVD install disc we decided to use our own Windows 7 Hard drive for this review. This meant we could return the G73 to ASUS exactly as it arrived with us, but test the machine with a fully legitimate Windows 7 installed and without the plethora of software from a previous system test. Sadly we can't report on preinstalled Asus software as we don't exactly know what they install ‘out of the box'.
After a clean operating install Windows 7 reports a very impressive series of figures, only being held back by the 5.9 maximum rating of a mechanical hard drive. We would like to see this machine shipping with a smallish SSD for a boot drive and a larger mechanical unit for storage, but it would assuredly add more to the cost.
Thats a good specification for the price. Seems it arrived in quite a state mind you.
good article, covers a lot of areas which is useful. That cpu seems really good, quite impressed with it.
That is an interesting looking machine. I dont think I really like the appearance from the back, but it look good in the normal, typing position
i really like it, 8gb of DDR3 as standard is pretty over the top ! shame the HDD side is poorly set up.
I love this machine. I really do. makes my dell looks positively pedestrian
Wow this is much better than I thought it would be, they haven’t compromised on anything. although I agree. either Raid 0 the 500GBs or remove one and put in a 40-60GB SSD, put the price up a tiny bit.
The lack of SSD in such a killer machine is a huge oversight. the price is good, but they have dropped the ball with the configuration of the drives. I cant believe one wasnt formatted either.!
Pretty much my perfect laptop. although id prefer a 1200 res screen at this size. gives a bit more deskspace.
Really brilliant, but i prefer a smaller machine with better battery life.
Styling rocks. performance rocks. battery life doesn’t. id change the HD’s out too. 120gb for boot (SSD) and a 1TB for storage. or even two 128 GB SSDS in raid 0. I think this machine might feel a lot slower than it is with the current setup. how did it act in speed Zardon? slow to boot?
needs an SSD, id never use a laptop now without one.
Hi Ted – performance was good, but you always feel a mechanical drive now as slightly sluggish when an OS disk, even for overall responsiveness. It wasn’t slow, but moving from a laptop with one in it, it can feel slow at times. I agree with your points but adding in an SSD would increase the price. unless they went for a 40GB unit as a boot drive.
I also like Asus G73./ It is a good laptop.
I have one, its awesome. Not really a portable laptop though, its too big and the battery life is not enough (just over an hour internet surfing). It is a great desktop replacement if you lack space, which is one of the reasons i went for it. The design is lovely. I liked the angles and exhausts vents before i bought it and its even better in real life. I imported mine from the states and saved about £500, even with the duty paid.