New Laptop - ASUS ROG Strix G16
Posted on July 9, 2024 by Aywren
A little over a week ago, I finally broke down and purchased a new gaming laptop. I’ve been trying to avoid doing this for years, even buying a nice Samsung tablet three years back, hoping it could take the place of a laptop completely.
RIP Old Laptop
For reference, my previous laptop (MSI GP60 2PE Leopard) is 10 years old. It originally came with Window 8 installed, but I eventually upgraded it to Windows 10. It ran fine for several years with Win 10, but then age (and likely OS bloat) caught up with it. It got to the point where turning the machine on was a 5 minute wait, and doing anything, like trying to boot up FFXIV (which did run on this machine at one point) was fairly impossible.
I tried wiping Win 10 and replacing this with Linux Mint, which is a very nice OS choice, btw! I was surprised at how user-friendly Mint is, and it did run lightly enough to revitalize the old laptop a little. However, anything more than just browsing the net crushed the poor machine. It still runs, it just doesn’t run well enough to do much.
Blame the Summer Heat
The main reason I broke down to get a new laptop was to battle the summer heat. Ever since I removed the shade trees from around my house two years ago, I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping the front room cool enough to be comfortable when the heat breaks over 92 outside – in the “feels like” over 100 weather. My bedroom is always nice and cool while the rest of the house roasted.
I did later discover how to rectify this, but back on June 30, I’d had enough. I wanted to hide from the heat in the most comfortable room, but the only problem was, I couldn’t bring FFXIV Dawntrail with me if I did.
Though it was not my intention to spend money on a laptop, I haven’t put all that much money into the tec I use, outside of the one tablet purchase three years ago. My old laptop, as I established, is a 10-year-old machine that still (kinda) runs.
I built my current desktop back when the Shadowbringers benchmark dropped in 2019. I have continued to upgrade this machine over time, but usually with hand-me-down tech that Syn is so gracious to gift me. So, I’ve gotten a lot of milage out of this PC!
This new laptop is the first big tech investment I’ve made in a long time, so I wasn’t quite sure what to look for when shopping for a gaming laptop. I, of course, hit up Syn and dropped her all sorts of potential Amazon links. I ended up going with this one, and so far, I’ve been pleased.
Windows 11 Fun
One of the bigger adjustments has been moving from Win 10 Pro to Win 11 Home, which was what came with this laptop. My current desktop is one that’s labeled “cannot upgrade to Windows 11” for whatever reason, and that’s fine. I don’t honestly want to make the move on that machine, anyhow.
So, this is my first experience with Win 11 and it’s been… fine, I guess. Between setting all that up and removing the bloatware that comes with a laptop (really, you stuck McAfee on here?), it took a few days to get the machine running what all I wanted it to run.
I didn’t like being forced to use my Microsoft account as a login, and being forced to add a login pin to that. The flipside is, yes, I know how to make it use a local account, but it also recognized that I already have MS Office 2021 registered to this account, and so allowed me to use the already-installed Office version on the laptop, as well.
I was surprised and delighted at the light strip along the front of the laptop and was pleased to see that the keyboard has some transparent keys around the WASD and spacebar. That tickled the 90s teen in me.
So far, the machine has been able to run whatever I’ve thrown at it, which is honestly not a huge amount. It only has a 1 TB drive – I know, I say “only,” but I’m used to my desktop, which has 4 times as much space. Still, I don’t expect to stack tons of games on my laptop like I do my desktop, anyhow.
Not being familiar with more modern gaming laptops, I didn’t realize that the machine downgraded gaming performance when you unplug it. I experienced that as a storm rolled in one evening, and I thought FFXIV would run the same way with the laptop unplugged as it did plugged in. Makes sense now, but just something I had to experience and learn.
As I said, I did find a fix to the cooling of my house, so the real reason I bought the laptop is somewhat a moot point, but I’m still happy to have it. It’s good to have a back up machine on hand should something happen to my desktop – especially since I do all of my bill paying, banking, etc. online now days. My desktop is over 5 years old, and not getting any younger.
I love that it’s a perfect footprint for the desk in my bedroom, too. It’s a smaller desk, so trying to fit a desktop machine in there is far more difficult. It feels like a laptop works for the smaller space just fine.
I won’t have a long-term opinion for the machine until I’ve used it for a while, but I did want to document in my blog the fact that I welcomed a new laptop last week. I know that sometimes I search my blog to look for posts about when I built a new machine, or upgraded it with a new card, so it’s useful for my own records to post this out here!
Any tips for laptop gaming are welcome as I’ve been a desktop gamer for so long. Also, Window 11 tips, if you have them!