Software And System Restore
Software
The main piece of software that controls the GX60 is the MSI S-Bar. The lighter-colored icons on the far left are for configuring function keys, accessing the Windows Accessory programs, Windows Programs, and MSI’s We Care. The darker icons control the display, touchpad, P1 custom launcher, ECO engine, webcam, Wi-Fi, sleep, brightness, and volume.
The ECO engine helps control power usage by allowing the machine to be used in Movie, Game, Presentation, or Office modes. Should you wish, the ECO engine can also be disabled.
Likewise, the Atheros Killer Network Manager allows network traffic to be prioritized for gaming or video streaming.
The screenshot above is a full listing of everything installed on the MSI GX60 as it shipped to us. As usual, we uninstalled as much as we could. After all, this is a gaming machine, and in our opinion, the GX60 should have an efficient OS so that its already-anemic APU isn't dragged down by background tasks.
The THX TruStudio Pro software is excellent if you also use the GX60 for entertainment. We also left the Atheros Killer software running. We left the S-bar installed, but disabled it from running at start-up.
System Restore
The GX60 comes with one disc that includes drivers and utilities. To get the rest of the discs needed for a full system recovery, you need to burn them yourself using software that comes pre-installed.
Restoring the system is very straightforward. At boot, just hit F3, tell the GX60 that you are completely sure that you want to restore the system, and then wait 45 minutes for the process to complete. After a couple of reboots, the system is back to its factory state.
Thankfully, you’re asked which software you want to install once the restore process completes. This lets you start out with a cleaner system than the shipping configuration. We wish that all system builders would include the stock Windows image for this very reason.
