Asus G75VW Boot Recovery. Formatting is not an option!!!!!

Hey guys,
I just got a new Asus G75VW with Windows 7 Ultimate loaded (in place of Home Premium). I do not have an Ultimate disk nor the Home Premium (except for the CD key in the bottom of the laptop). The current Windows was booting by EFI so this was going to be a special solution.

I completely f'd up my Asus G75VW laptop by messing with EasyBCD. In detail, I messed up by using EasyBCD 1.6, since adding a new entry has the ability to choose Generic x86 as the boot type or whatever. I needed this option because lots of hackintosh tutorials used this. Turns out, EasyBCD 1.6 is not supported by Win7. I loaded some defaults with EasyBCD, saved it, and restarted my computer. NOW YOU CAN POUND ME INTO A PANCAKE!!!!!

So when I boot, windows boot manager loads into an error screen that says something is wrong with the BCD. The location was either of the error was either (forgot which displayed first):

/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/BCD

or

/Boot/BCD


So, what are my options? A. Fix the boot for Windows Ultimate. B. Format the drive with Windows Home Premium. I opted for A: So what worked and what didn't?

- When doing a search, I found a lot of people suggest using the Repair disk in the Windows Install DVD. This DID NOT WORK....yet. Something about being EFI bootable will show an incompatibility error no matter which Windows disk I used.

Then I downloaded the Hiren Boot CD 15.2!!!!

- Then I used DiskGenius, which was part of the CD. This may work for some, but it totally f'd up my BCD. Refer to here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/228504-missing-boot-manager-4.html

Using it pretty much just made the whole drive unallocated, although the partitions were still there, but lost.

- Then I used Partition Recovery Wizard, another utility in the CD. I basically used this to find partitions and repair it. It successfully did.

- Now when I restarted the computer, it would say BootMgt is missing.

- So I popped in a Windows 7 disk. At the installation screen, I pressed shift+f10 to go to the command line and I ran all the bootrec commands. It successfully did.This also assigned a drive to the BCD. So you when you run bcdedit in command line, you see "partition=c:" instead of {unknown}

- I believe it still didn't boot then. So now I booted up the Windows 7 Ultimate DVD and hit the repair disk option. Finally!!! It passed the incompatibility error. Now all I did was choose the option to fire up the Startup Recovery.

- When I booted, now there are 2 options for this drive. To boot off the Windows Boot Manager or the drive itself. The boot manager, I believe, boots off the EFI partition. This will obviously create an error since I did not fix this. So if I boot off the hard drive itself, it will FINALLY LOAD INTO WINDOWS! YA!

Conclusion:

I know this was not a clean fix, since I converted from EFI to MBR boot (or is it GPT or MBR boot?). Anyways, I am not a claimed IT, hardware expert either. But I'm just glad this thing is finally working.

Journey, From AMD to Intel

Finally suckered into going to the darkside. Micro Center just had a good deal for an i7 2600k for $200 bucks and it also knocked down $50 bucks for certain motherboards. So, I only bought the cpu and an Asus p8z68-LX mobo for $70. This came up to $290 for everything.

I hoped that it was going to be a quick install, but there came some huge problems. When I had everything attached and fired up, the mobo wouldn't post. A red light would just stay on by the RAM slots, which meant something was wrong up in this neighborhood. So it came down to using only ONE RAM slot, which caused the mobo to finally post, but running dual channel was a no go. I did every possible combination, so I'm sure the RAM slots were shot.

Being disappointed, I wasn't expecting more disappointing things to happen. When I took the CPU off, about 5 pins were bent like crazy. I looked up what can be done to solve this problem before I take a stab at it, and I only found that it's EXTREMELY difficult to get it returned/exchanged/RMA'd once the pins are bent. So I said, screw it and I actually got most of the pins straightened except for one pin that had a broken tip. Just for curiosity, I put back the CPU on, but it failed once again.

So being that I wanted the processor installed ASAP, I went back to Micro Center to attempt an exchange, which failed. The clerk quickly noticed the bent pins and sent me off. Being very disappointed, I might as well finish the build and by and new Mobo, which is a Gigabyte z68apd3.

This added $100 bucks to the bill. Making the whole deal pretty useless at a total of $360 spent. I dug deep into my optimism and told myself that I may still use the motherboard later if I get a cheap 1155 socket CPU, and I just have to use one RAM stick. But before that, I will try to RMA board.

Finally, I was able to successfully install the new board and CPU. My impression? I have yet to see major improvements in speed. This probably most likely due to the bottle necking by my 7200 rpm hard drive. Also, I haven't run any performance tests. So it's really hard to say why I bought this for besides saying that it was a good deal.  I guess later I'll have find out.

Sound quality is punchier and cleaning than my previous ASRock board.  It's a nice little bonus.

I will continue this later...

Monitors Comparisons: LCD and LED so far...

I deleted the old LG E2550 vs ASUS VH236H thread. Just thought it was unfair to judge only 2 very different monitors specifically. So this thread will be a continuous rant of what I notice within the monitors that I have. For right now, I ONLY have the LG E2550 and ASUS VH236H. In future, I shall obtain more!!! So lets get started!

Color:

LG E2550T: The colors are very natural, cool, and crisp. When looking at the monitor with just a full screen HD picture loaded, I don't feel like I'm looking into a monitor anymore, but I feel like I'm staring through a window of a different dimension where everything in life is in HD. IMO, this would be perfect for graphic/video artists. I would have to test this with another monitor to see if LG is doing things right, or this is just a property of LED monitors.

On the other hand, the colors do not get vibrant, even if it tried. So when there is a lot of ambient light, especially light hitting the screen, the colors start to go pale and doesn't feel exciting anymore. In majority of cases, this shouldn't happen though.

VH236H: The colors are very vibrant, but maybe too vibrant to the point where colors seem to bleed and come out at you....BRO. For someone that stares at the screen a lot, they probably don't need the eyestrain from vivid colors jumping all over the place. So my configuration is to make the colors as natural, calm looking as possible. I could not get it anywhere as spectacular as the LG E2550T, and I could only reproduce a more pale-ish/gray-ish look. It's still good enough for reducing eyestrain though.

Objects with a yellow-to-orange shading looks very unnatural. Comparing the haystack wallpaper that comes stock in the Windows 7 OS, I notice the orange shading has a strong reddish tone to it, like it seems to be leaking ketchup or something. But I didn't really buy this monitor for this purpose of seeing bleeding ketchup. I will mention its purpose later.

Unlike the LG E2550T, ambient light glare does phase the ASUS! Turn on the elite scenery mode and you get colors that are especially pleasant to the eye. It still bleeds ketchup and it is not natural looking, but the visuals won't be as boring.

Brightness:

LG E2550T: This thing has an extreme contrast ratio. For example, when viewing the image of the haystack that comes stock in the Windows 7 OS, there are no big blobs of bright spots. Now pull up a browser with a web page that has a white background, and you'll be like, "Whoahh, close the shutters!!!!" Now put on a HD picture with the sun, and it really feels like you're staring into the sun! This is with brightness half way!

 I usually have the monitor brightness set to 0 when I'm doing beginner coding, but after awhile, the brightness of a white background still hurts my eyes. I know, I know, just change my background to white, right? Yea, but I'm lazy.

VH236H: This is one of the top reasons why I bought an LCD monitor. I heard the brightness can go loww, loww, low. When I'm coding with low-mid light ambience, I have the brightness at 0. It's kind of like looking at the ink-technology thingie that the old kindle uses, and I can stare at that for hours. When there is lots of light around, I switch to scenery mode where brightness turns up to about 50 I think.

Input Lag:

Okay, I went to some site for this one where you display a stop watch on both monitors. Then take a picture with both monitors in view, and the one that has a higher number has less lag. Here's the site: http://tft.vanity.dk/

I was surprise to see that the LG E2550T kept winning by .01 ms against the ASUS VH236H. I really have nothing more to say about this. 


Monitor Controls:

LG E2550T: Smooth as eggs. Love it and I don't miss tactile buttons on monitors anymore.

ASUS VH236H: Let's just say using the force still causes problems in operating these buttons. I hate them! Luckily, there are savable presets so I can jump from one mode to another without adjust brightness. *CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK* "YES! WENT FROM 95 to 91!!! 91 MORE CLICKS TO GO!!! SIGGGHHH~~~~

Weight:

LED monitors only eat slim fast. THUMBS UP!
LCD monitors only eat tacos.
Just for fun.... CRT = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJQEl5vcAo