I got my Y500 last week. I tried to use windows 8, but one of the first dialog boxes that popped up made me drill down a couple levels to do what I needed. That was all it took for me to dislike Win 8. I had also ordered the Crucial 256Gb SSD. So I pulled out the old hard drive to try to save battery power, and installed Win 7 onto the SSD. I like it a lot now and it boots in about 11 seconds. The only issue that I am having is that the trackpad does not seem to recognize gestures. I use a mouse with it most of the time though so it doesn't really bother me all that much. I read there is about 20Gb of bloatware installed on the machine when you get it. That is another reason to install Win 7. I'm glad I did it.