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There's a button in the top left corner of my laptop that works as a method to switch between onboard graphics and the dedicated graphics card, but for the past month or two it hasn't been working. When I push it, nothing happens. I went to the Asus website and, as far as I know, installed pretty much everything there, but to no avail.
The FN key also doesn't work, except to turn off or adjust the backlight. But volume controls and everything else doesn't work.
Sounds like you're going to need to crack that thing open and check the cable connections and test the buttons with a multimeter. Usually all of them will be on a small board with a flexible flat cable or a small bundle of wires. You just have to go fishing and find out why they're physically not connecting.
My wife's little netbook recently had an intermittent connection to the camera. Turned out the hinge screw posts had broken free and the cable was getting chewed up by the increased movement. I managed to fix the plastic screw mounts with epoxy putty, but the camera cable didn't work out. Left it unplugged as it would keep the system from booting up.
The lights next to the button blink when I start the laptop, so I don't know, it's kind of weird. And like, there's the keyboard issues too, so I think there's something wrong with the software or something.
Is it still under warranty? Send it in. If not, get out the screwdrivers and spudger. And, of course, check online for a teardown. It's not that hard. I can pull the main board out of my wife's netbook in like 10 minutes.
If you don't have a spudger, get a guitar pick. Works great for popping all those hidden lock tabs. I made a spudger out of a piece of acrylic left from one of Fuganater's fan grilles, ground the end to a soft bevel and rounded it up with a sanding stick. Works perfect.
i have alot of experience with the ul50vt.... which has the turbo button top left hand side of the keyboard..... if u can still use that button to boot the system it should be fine.... what i found was when the drivers were in any way out of line they would go wonky and lose things like sccelerated gfx and was unable to use transparency....
and the way to install the GFX drivers on those systems is horrendous.... and asus leaves it up to guess work
Asus = Junk
ASUS laptops and netbooks seem to be a tad on the flimsy side. Seriously... screws to hold the HINGE for the screen threaded into a brass fastener which is pressed into a thin plastic donut that sticks up off the bottom of the case. Really? Put some more plastic around that. Maybe some metal. Or make the hinge longer so there's less stress on the plastic mount.
Good thing I have plenty of 2 part epoxy putty around...
Check the bios to see if the graphics switching is disabled. I've seen that... or driver corruption.
Actually, isnt there a service/app running for those shortcut keys? If that's not installed (after a clean reinstall, rather than a restore), then they probably wont work.
Make sure the app in running in msconfig
Oh snap... that might be it. I did mess around in MSCONFIG awhile back. I wonder what it would be called?
Edit: Yup. That was it. I selected Normal Startup and was more careful with my deselecting. Everything works fine now. I knew it was software related....