ASUS N550JV Entertainment Laptop Frequently Asked Questions

• How much does the laptop weight?

The touch version weigh about 2.6kg (5.7lbs) and the non-touch version weigh about 2.3kg (5lbs). The power pack is a 120W one that weigh about 0.3kg (0.7lbs).

• Is the screen full HD? Is it IPS? Is it matte or Glossy? 

I can't speak for the others but mine is 15.7 1920x1080 FHD IPS LED glossy touch screen. It's made by LG and the model number is LG LP156WF4-SPB1. I think the non-touch version are matte. The average brightness is 277.7 cd/m², Contrast is 1410:1 and black value is 0.21 cd/m².

• Is the Glossy screen annoying? 

The Screen is glossy and reflective but it's not the worst I have seen. The glare depends on your screen brightness and ambient light, if the brightness is down it can be distracting but it's not as bad if your screen brightness is all the way up. It's also worse if you are in a well lit room. I find it's bearable in the library with the brightness set at 80%

• Is ASUS N550JV noisy?

The fans of the N550JV always spin even when the laptop is idle there and the CPU is only at 40 degrees. However, the fans are fairly quiet and you have to listen hard to notice it. Notebookcheck.net measures that while idle, the system noise remains moderate with a noise level of 32.9 dB(A) and reaches 42.6 dB(A) under medium load (3D Mark 06), but only 38 dB(A) under full load.

There is a little neat program called NoteBook FanControl that can keep the N550JV absolutely quite. The default auto option of this software works really well and only spin the fun when the CPU reaches 60 degrees. I hardly hear the fan while doing light work like word processing and net browsing.

• How to upgrade to SSD?

Please see the upgrade guide in this post. It has a 2.5 inch hard drive bay so almost all 2.5 inch SSD will fit. You will need Torx Screwdriver No. 5 to crack open the case. There are 10 screws and nothing is hiding under the rubber feet. The front of the bottom cover come off very easily but there are a few clips around the hinge. Be patient and don't force it.

• Is the wireless really that rubbish?

The laptop comes with Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 WIFI and bluetooth 4.0 combi card. It works ok and the range is not great but it's not too bad. Some people has reported that the card sometimes disconnect itself for no particular reason but it only happened to me once and recovered after restart. Updating to the latest driver should help. Some users have reported that this is due to the power saving feature that can be disabled by opening the Atheros networking adapter in Device manager, click "properties", go to "power management" tab and untick the option "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".

It's a standard half height mini PCI-E card so easily upgradable. There are two antennas and you can put almost any half height mini PCI-E card in. There is not stupid whitelist problems like Lenovo.

If you want to upgrade, I recommend Intel 7260HMW IEEE 802.11AC, dual-band, 2x2 Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 4.0 Mini PCI Express combo card. It will cost you around £20 and should work much better. Be careful about the part number when purchase the card though, you want the 7260HMW rather than 7260HMW BN, the latter only support wireless N.

• What about the battery life?

It has a 4 cell 59 Wh Lithium Polymer Battery. I get about 4 hours while doing light work such as browsing the net, word processing etc.

• How to create a recovery disk?

Unfortunately there is no on board software that you can use to create recovery disk. You can use
EaseUS Todo Backup to create a backup clone and burn it to DVDs but this won't help if you can't boot in the OS. You can use windows 8's backup facility to create a back up on a flash drive and you will need a 16GB one.

• Is CPU throttling a big problem? How to stop it? 

The short answer is NO. Some users and reviews have reported that the CPU throttle at 800MHz when it reaches 80 degrees, which it only happens at some extreme conditions like running Prime95 and FurMark at the same time. In real life, it's unlikely that we will ever experience this.

It this annoys you,  you can disable CPU throttling using throttlestop by following this guide. Another work around is set your CPU max to 99% in windows power management (Control Panel -> Energy Settings -> Power4Gear High Performance -> Change Energyplan Settings -> Advanced Energy Settings -> Processor Energy Management -> There you find Min & Max.). This will disable the turbo and you CPU max will be 2.4MHz instead of 3.4MHz, this should be sufficient for most tasks and keep the CPU cool.

This is put in place by ASUS probably due to the fact that the cooling systems are not able to cool both CPU and GPU at maximum load at the same time. To be honest, the cooling system design is quite poor. Each 90 degree bend on a heat pipe reduce it's efficiency by about 25%, the GPU pipe was bent twice and it's rather thin as well. On comparison, slightly under powered Dell XPS 9530 has a thicker heat pipes that was bent very little.

 

The other problem is that the drop-down hinge blocks the airflow, half the heat went down and the other half up at the screen. seriesly, what are you thinking, ASUS.

• How to flash an older bios?

Use WinFlash and use cmd to navigate to the folder where WinFlash's executable is and start it up with the phrase WinFlash /nodate so that you can flash an older bios even though WinFlash & Asus Easy Flash straight up refuse to flash to an older bios.

• Headphone static noise?

Some users have reported static noise while plugging in earphone. I haven't experience this yet but this can be solved by uninstalling the Realtek audio driver.

• How to check laptop temperature? How to Check CPU temperature? How to Check GPU Graphic card temperature? 

I use HWMonitor, it's a free software and it's very easy to use. Please note if you want to check NVIDIA 750M temperature, you need to start the game first then start the HWMonitor as in the normal condition the NVIDIA GPU is disabled and there is nothing to check.

• Can I upgrad Ram, which model?

Yes you can. the laptop has two memory slots and can support a maximum of 16GB of RAM. You will need 1.35 V DDR3L 1600MHz memory. Mine come with 1 single 8GB stick but some machines come with 2x4GB.

• Can I upgrad Ram, which model?

Yes you can. the laptop has two memory slots and can support maximum of 16GB of RAM. You will need 1.35 V DDR3L 1600MHz memory. Mine come with 1 single 8GB stick but some machines come with 2x4GB.

• How to enter UEFI BIOS? 

This can be a bit tricky as windows 8/8.1 boot so fast. I found the best way to do it is restart the laptop and hit F2 like crazy right after you press the start button until the bios screen shows up.

• How to enter boot menu? 

This can be a bit tricky as windows 8/8.1 boot so fast. I found the best way to do it is restart the laptop and hit ESC like crazy right after you press the start button until the boot menu shows up.

• What if I hate windows 8/8.1? I miss windows 7 start menu. 

You can install windows 7 on this machine and all driver can be found on individual manufacturer's website. There are 4 specific driver that you need to download from the manufacturer's website. All the rest you can use the windows 8 driver from ASUS's site.

Geforce 750M: Drivers | GeForce

Ethernet: Realtek
Audio: Realtek
USB 3.0: Intel

If you cannot be bothered, you can install softwares such as Classic Shell or StartIsBack to make windows 8/8.1 look like windows 7. I like windows 8 so I haven't really test either software but people do give good feedback on them.

• How to fix 'You are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU' ?
• How to fix Graphic related 'Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)'?

Some times, normally happens after a game crash, you laptop will display a message like 'Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)' and when you try to open NVIDIA control panel, you will receive a message like  'You are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU'. This is due to NVIDIA driver error that cause windows to disable the NVIDIA card (hardware level?). If you check the device manager, you can see an annoying yellow device manager yellow exclamation point next to you NVIDIA card. To solve this, you can simply disable the card then reenable it. If this doesn't work, you need to flash the bios. It doesn't have to be a newer version, it can be the same or even older version (Check how-to a few paragraphs up). This will reset the card and it should work again.

• Will disable NVIDIA GPU increase battery runtime? 

Not really, it has actually been reported that this will decrease battery time. This is probably because that windows is not able to manage it's power profile while disabled.

• Can I over-clock the NVIDIA GT 750 GPU? 

Some users have managed to over-clock the GPU from 1150 / 900 to 1250/1100 using MSI after burner but I haven't tried this personally.

• Why some of my programmes looks fuzzy? 

This is because the windows 8 auto scaling which is not very clever. You can change this by right click on desktop, Screen Resolution, Make text or other items larger or smaller, Check "let me choose one scaling level...." and change the text zoom level to 100%.

• How do I start ThrottleToggle wih windows.

To put it in startup you need to create a simple task.
So go to control panel -> administrative tools -> task scheduler -> on the right side click on "Create Basic Task..." -> give it a name -> trigger at login -> action is "start program" -> choose the ThrottleToggle.exe and add the argument -f in the second line if you don't want to have the window open until you hit a key -> click on the checkbox and go on -> click the checkbox "Run with highest privileges" and confirm -> you're done and it starts after you log in.

After putting the notebook to standby and waking it up it would start throttling again.

To solve this you have to add one more trigger:
control panel -> administrative tools -> task scheduler -> right click on the throttletoggle task -> triggers -> new -> on a event, source: Power-Troubleshooter, event id: 1

To avoid any possible conflicts like logging out, putting to standby, waking and logging in (the task would run twice resulting in toggling the throttling back on) you have to change the original At Logon event to At System Startup and also change the user, which will run the task to SYSTEM (this will also give a nice bonus in hiding the command line window).

 

• How to install the latest graphic driver from Intel/NVIDIA?

Sometimes, when you try to install the latest graphic driver from Intel/NVIDIA website you will receive an error message say that your hardware is not supported and ask you to contact vendor. This is because that ASUS drivers have the OEM signature which will prevent a generic driver to be installed. The easy work around is to uninstall ASUS driver first then the generic driver should install without any problem.

• How do I know if my NVIDIA card is doing it's job?

You can enable an activity indicator in the Nvidia control panel for the tray area, if it's colored the Nvidia card is working and if it's gray then it's not. To do this, go to NVIDIA control panel, Click desktop menu, tick Display GPU activity icon.

If you find this post useful, Please get me a beer, Cheers!