Asus G73 Republic Of Gamers Laptop Review

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.

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