Sottilde

The last few generations of Intel Core processors haven't really brought a lot to the table in terms of performance increases. If you have a decent amount of RAM (>= 8GB) and an SSD, the performance of this machine should tide you over for at least 3 years. It's true that the Haswell upgrade is not possible (different socket), and you likely wouldn't gain anything in performance that you could perceive. The real benefit of upgrading to Haswell is battery life, and unfortunately the Y500 fails pretty badly at battery life in general because of the missing switchable graphics. I wouldn't worry about it. The 3632QM should be more than enough for a few years.

If you want to replace the mSATA with something bigger but keep the caching, I put together a small guide on how to get ExpressCache to work with another drive. You could, for example, partition 32GB of the SSD to run as a cache and put programs on the remaining space.

I haven't been able to get that to work, it looks as though there's some sort of artificial limiting. The official response from Lenovo is that it should work, however. Worst-case, get a DisplayLink adapter, they work pretty well with minimal CPU load.

Has anyone had an issue with the Y500 refusing to boot from a USB drive (can't flash my BIOS if I can't USB boot)? It constantly restarts in UEFI mode and hangs in Legacy Support mode. I don't really see any other settings I should tweak and the USB drive works fine in Windows and on other machines.

You may want to try to extract your Win8 key from your current installation using this tool, (try mirror link here). You should be able to install from the OEM disk with that key.