PC World - broken laptop Xmas present

Hannaho

Hi! My son opened his gaming laptop this a.m. and the backlit won't work on the keyboard, and also he has discovered that despite paying e950 that the graphics card and memory isn't suitable for a lot of the games he wants to download on Steam. It was a display model and was reduced by e170 ti e950 - but we bought it assuming everything was ok - we saw it in the shop and the backlit worked then. The guy told us it was suitable for downloading 90 per cent of games on Steam. My son is not even able to log into the Stem shop on it - though the wifi here is fine. Where do we go now with it? Bring back to the shop? We bought it five weeks ago and opened it this a.m. - a very disappointed 13 year old!

jhegarty

What graphics card does it have ?

YbFocus

Sorry to jump in on this but the backlit keyboards are optional in the settings usually.
For battery life reasons.

If he can't sign into steam that's not the computers fault either.

What is the spec on it?

Mycroft H

What's the model? It probably can play most games with a moderate graphics adapter. Laptops aren't exactly plug and play compared to consoles. For example, mine, occasionally uses the power saver Intel graphics when playing causing terrible framerates. Tweaking the settings you can use the powerful nvidia chip.

Steam is a sperate issue. It was down for a while today. They've big sales on now and there's going to be a few new devices logging in Christmas morning.

Hannaho

hi the graphics card is a geforce gtx 950m and on reviews online of the laptop (it is the asus n551j) it says it has an gtx 860m (i think) and an i7 processor (it came with an i5). He tried to download a game called Space Engineers and then he realised he didn't have the recommended requirements. he didn't know if it would work so he got a refund. he also got minecraft and it was slightly choppy. he tried to download GMod but it wouldn't load multiplayer. the game besiege works at 60fps solid. The man at pc world said that it could run GTA V at around 50fps but my son doesn't think it could run at 30fps. thats because the laptop is also below the recommended requirements for GTA V. Many of the Games need a quad core i5 but his laptop is just 1 core i think. Can you all tell me what to do because I'm not techy and he was very disappointed! thanks a million!

Graham

What's the make and model of the laptop? It's probably printed on a barcode on the underside of the machine.

Hannaho

Also in reply to YBFocus we just looked in the settings and we couldn't see it. Thank you for the reply though!

Hannaho

Graham the model and type is an Asus N551J

Hannaho

Sorry the make is actually an N551JX. on the box it said n551j

Graham

From what I can see, it's a Decent spec quad core Intel i7 processor with a graphics card that should cope with most games at high or max settings.

I suspect some of the issues you are having are config related rather than the machine being sub-par. You should post the issues your having to the PC forum rather than consumer issues. I'll find you a link.

Looks like a rather nice laptop so I wouldn't panic immediately.

Hannaho

thanks a million!!

simdan

Graham wrote:

From what I can see, it's a good spec quad code Intel i7 processor with a decent graphics card.

They bought the i5 version with a lower end card. I'm still surprised it doesn't handle the games well though..

dudara

Moving this thread to the Laptops forum to see if they can help you there.

dudara

Graham

simdan wrote: »

They bought the i5 version with a lower end card. I'm still surprised it doesn't handle the games well though..

I can't find any N551JX with the i5 processors, only the i7. Still looking though.

Graham

Just in case you missed a couple of points above.

1) steam is under pressure today, half the country trying out new laptops.
2) it looks like the laptop has 2 graphic cards. One low power (integrated) and the other high-power. If you're running in battery, it's likely to default to the low power adapter. You may have to do something to switch to the high power adapter.

Cunning Alias

I had an old Asus G series laptop that had a few lights and such on it. There was some specific asus software that controlled these. Maybe check their website to see if there is optional software that you can download to controll the backlight

PauloMN

My son has an Asus G551J for a few months now which sounds very similar to your son's one. It handles Steam no bother whatsoever so I think you should be good as regards spec. His is i7, 860M graphics and 8Gb RAM. My son couldn't access the Steam store earlier today.

I'd say try again tomorrow, and reinstall the original machine configuration if still problematic.

Mycroft H

NVidia Control panel is the application you want to control high power video card. You can force a game to use the video card. It's included with the latest NVidia Drivers which I would always recommend getting.

There's very little difference in the real world between the i5 and the i7s fitted in a 1k euro laptop. I wouldn't fuss about it.

pah

I'd be doing a factory reset on this ASAP as there could be any number of settings or things wrong with it having been a display model

thisistough

Just to add there seems to be a global issue with Steam and apparently it's been taken offline

devnull

Can you look on the box of the laptop on the barcode and find the full model number, it should be something like this.

ASUS N551JK-CN073H

The N551JK is the laptop model name, whereas the CN073H determines the actual specification of the unit and how it is configured. There are lots of different configurations of the N551 and if you give us the full number found on the barcode on the box, we'll be able to help you better.

PC World often do cut down versions of ASUS machines with lower specifications than are available elsewhere, the main model number is generally the same but with a different configuration so it's totally possible the OP could have an i5 version of a laptop that can be bought from everywhere else with an i7.

I had the same issue with PC World about 18 months ago and was mis-sold an ASUS laptop by advertising a 6 cell battery when the machine came with a 3 cell that didn't last 5 minutes. I called ASUS support and after a bit of investigation they confirmed the version of the laptop that I had was a special DSG SKU which was not sold through any other retailer. This laptop was also supposed to have a backlit keyboard but didn't an ASUS confirmed that the DSG exclusive version did not offer such feature but the general models sold by other shops did.