masterkey1233

I don't think that lowering the brightness for the 5 minute startup is going to save a whole lot of battery, we're talking about what, 1%?

I have a cheapo battery cooling pad from Big Lots, and I play games pretty heavily, and it's been enough for me. Y500 hasn't ever gotten past even kinda warm. If you're looking for a cooling pad just get whatever, I don't think it matters too much, the Y500 did an okay enough job at dealing with heat.

I've noticed all the USB ports are pretty finicky about whether they want to work. I had a cheap Android charger from Dollar Tree, and it took about 20 minutes for the laptop to actually recognize that something was plugged into the USB port.

Hate that I'd have to pay for a touchscreen, but a 4K display would be cool, even if the laptops would be around $4000 if it could handle it with gaming. Perhaps this will be for 4K movies primarily? Even so, I'd recommend waiting. Every time they raise the bar on display quality the processors have never caught up to handling them and they lag horribly. Hold out.

I'd had to use WIndows 7, Windows 8 is just so bad in so many little ways I just can't tolerate it. #1 reason is the startbar. I know you can get it back with say, Class Shell, but Classic Shell made my control panel the small icons, very inconvenient, and has an annoying habit of not going away during video games/movies. Granted, there's usually a fix for most everything on Windows 8, but I shouldn't have to do that. Recommend getting 7 immediately after getting a y500/10p, it'll save you the trouble of backing up all your files later when 8 has annoyed you too much.

Ebay or Amazon always. You could go to third-party sites that'll have them cheaper, but if the part never comes or doesn't work or whatever, you're out of luck. Ebay and Amazon's dealers have always given me a refund if the product wasn't exactly as it was described.