I was quite disappointed to lose the Asus to motherboard problems. It was the first time I had a motherboard fail and it was just less than three years old. I must have been very hard on it with the long hours of continuous gaming.
After reconciling myself to the fact it was not repairable, I decided to salvage the two hard drives (one 120 Gig, the other 1 terabyte) as well as the memory cards (two 8 Gig) for potential future use.
With nothing to lose by making a mistake that would harm a motherboard component, I took it apart (removing 7 or 8 small screws from the back) which allowed me to turn it over and take off the keyboard from the top (unsnapping all the way around the edges) and was able to quite easily take out those components. It was while doing this that I realized the battery was in its own separate compartment and it would not have taken this whole procedure to remove it on my own. That knowledge might come in handy sometime in the future.
Because I was not sure I had all the data backed up when the computer died, I bought a USB to SATA adapter and plugged each drive in to copy and save all the data. It was a relatively small investment to buy that adapter, but well worth it.
Having gutted it, I took the computer to the shop for them to recycle, something they do without charge for basically all kinds of hardware.
So ends the story of the Asus ROG laptop (referred to by Asus as a “notebook”).
Tech Muddler 