KYRUSS55

I agree with the Asus Xonar line producing wonderful sound. I use headphones for gaming. USB headphones in my opinion do not have the sample or bit rate to sound great compared to a high quality sound card. The Xonar line simply packs a punch when you set it up properly. I've tried soundblaster, realtek, and IDT Audio. They all are inferior to asus's sound that come from the Xonar line. Make sure to buy a high sample and bit rate card, you don't need all the fancy shielding or the controller, just get a Xonar card that fits your slot. Don't forget that you will need a floppy drive power connector for most of the cards so it will power the headphone amp.

That buzzing sound, sounds like a loose ground on the transformer.

I agree, the Lenovo ideapad Y series is a fantastic choice. I'm not too fond of the windows 8 UI, but you can usually install windows 7 drivers even if Lenovo doesn't have them on their website. The laptop is powerful, has a wonderful GPU, plenty of memory, great i7 processor, and a good resolution screen. If you want to boost the performance past there, I'd get a SSD card for the msata slot, a second graphics card, and a hybrid hard drive for storing images or movies. The machine feels solid in your hands, and is really quite pleasant to work with.

I'd personally avoid MSI if I were you. Myself as well as many other friends have had SERIOUS issues with MSI. Bad monitors, video cards failing, lighting connections breaking. Excessive flexing in the case is a major issue with mine. The turn around time for a fixed laptop is also pretty terrible.

The lenovo 510p is probably one of the best deals out there for a laptop. I don't know what your problem is, but you can easily upgrade the wifi card. There are just a few screws under the laptop and you're good to go. With all the money you saved by buying this machine you could buy a wireless ac card such as the 7260. You have a backlit keyboard, available drivers, solidly built machine, Hard drive bay with ability to put in a big ssd, or caching ssd.

SSD's in this machine run super fast. I'm using a mushkin 240gb getting read speeds of 550mbps and write of around 500

My Y400 does the same thing. Just take the battery out when you are putting it away for an extended period of time. It does it with different brand batteries too. Yes, my usb plug is set to off. I don't know if it is a BIOS issue or what.

If you can't afford a cooling pad, you will be surprised with how much cooler your laptop will run when it is elevated a bit. You can try getting taller rubber feet for the bottom of the case. You can also try flipping bottle caps over and putting the rubber feet on top of those.