JUST purchased a Lenovo Y500, bad timing?

It said this: 15.6" FHD LED Anti-Glare Wedge 1920x1080. I will say, the screen does look pretty damn good, and like I said, the reflection isn't too bad, or even noticeable most times except for a dark screen.

 

The screen is not antiglare though ,its glare type so the website is definitely a typo.

So I just got the laptop, and I have to say overall im impressed.

Good: Screen (although its glare), keyboard, speakers ( I have never heard such good sound from laptops)

Bad: holy god the touchpad is terrible. Ive never used these smart clickpads before, but damn its impossible to use right now. I might get used to it as I go on, but for now external mouse with me at all times.

Also port placement isnt the best. To connect my mouse I have to plug the cord to the left side of the screen. I am so used to having usb ports near the screen and not near me. But its a very small gripe.

 

I totally agree with you on the touchpad. It's a major pain and I've been using it a couple weeks. I installed the latest synaptics drivers and it seemed to help but you lose the quick switch gesture for some reason. Not a game changer for me since I usually use a couch mouse or wired while docked. I also agree the usb ports are too far forward. I can see no advantage to this and it's the only reason I bought a new mouse, solely for the nano adapter

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

Don't worry a out those games.

Right now, the single most useful thing you could do for all of who are hungry to see performance numbers is:
1) Download and install the latest drivers from nVidia . com.
2) Download and run 3dMark11. It is a free benchmarking tool. Just install and run it on default settings.

3) Report the score you get back. It should be in the neighborhood of 4400-4600 from what people have guessed. You would be the first to be able to confirm this.

 

Mine has also just arrived. Won't be able to get to it till later this evening.

I hope to be able to give a quick overview soon too.

I can also do a quick QA comparison as I have twins...one for me and one for my GF Both SLI.:thumbsup:

 

Yeah thats exactly what were all dying to see. Im anxious to know if this thing really does compare to a GTX 675mx

 

haha Im glad im not the only one who saw the port placement issue. I dont get lenovos reason for it at all

And thanks for the heads up on the drivers, ill update them and see

 

You'll find that there is no NVidia drivers for this yet on their site. And from what I've read, at the moment we are limited to the Lenovo drivers due to the way they implemented the sli. I will run 3dmark when I get home in a couple hours.

I also am not super impressed with the touchpad. I pretty much always have an external mouse with me anyways.

The more I use this, the happier I am with my decision. The size/weight is definitely manageable, and the thing is blazing fast. My only complaint is the touch pad. As said earlier, the screen is good, the speakers are great for a laptop, keyboard is great coming from my thinkpad I use at work (t530). Heat doesn't seem to be too bad yet, I've been using it on my lap and its no warmer than my last couple laptops. Battery life doesn't seem too terrible for what this machine is, I am on powersaver at the moment and the gauge is showing 3hr 15min with 85% left. All in all the laptop seems solidly built, no odd flexes or noises other than this odd touchpad.

 

Can someone take a picture of the "anti-glare" screen with a window or light source reflecting off of it so that we get a look at the glare? I'm curious about this purported anti-reflective coating.

Also you guys should use the Synaptics touchpad driver on the drivers partition or from Lenovo's website, not the latest one from the Synaptics website. The latest one is a different edition, Synaptics Clickpad 8.1 instead of 1.1, and is missing some Lenovo customizations so things like using the Fn key combo to disable the touchpad will not work properly.

 

Well I can confirm to you that it is not anti glare ... lol. It is definetly a typo, the screen if full on glare/glossy.

Also do you guys know how to solve a squeaking spacebar, everything else is perfect but the spacebar started squeaking and its starting to annoy me.

 

I'm glad the USB ports are on the left. The reason is because if your USB ports on the right, then the USB plugs would stick out far enough as to interfere with your mousing hand. I'd rather have a longer mouse cable that I route behind the machine, than a shorter mouse cable that I bump into when mousing.

As for why the ports are forward... If you look at most laptops, the USB ports are located further back, around where Lenovo had to reserve motherboard / chassis cutout room for the Ultra bay module slot.

 

Ok Guys found this thanks to theagent on slickdeals y500 750m sli 3dmark11 score...

Nvidia Inspector set to +40MHz and +80MHz respectively, for the base clock of each GPU. Not a huge jump...but it's something.

 

I would have preferred the usb where the power is and the power in the back. Oh well though, small potatoes

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

Way to pull a bait-and-switch on the "anti-glare" screen Lenovo.

You need to carefully pry out the spacebar and lubricate the hinges with something like Tri-Flow. If you're carefully and take it slow nothing should break. I performed this fix before on a squeaky spacebar in my ASUS G73Jh.

 

The thing is, laptops that have power on the back cannot have a "rounded hinge" design.

The back of the laptop would need a rectangle design, increasing the thickness of the laptop.

 

Wow it looks like it really does perform the same as the GTX 675mx, it actually had a score about 5% better.

 

I was scheduled to receive mine tomorrow but it came today, I missed it thou so ill be getting it tomorrow. These quality control issues are interesting thou. I wonder if it is indeed quality control or just extremely poor shipping packaging on lenovo's side. I've seen my fare share of unboxing video on YouTube and if that's how their packaged form China , then that might also be an issue. I know when I brought my girlfriend her Sony vaio laptop, the laptop box itself was placed in another box. I don't know, for some thing like this being shipped for across the world in a poor shipping method is beyond me.

 

Dead/stuck pixels and balky touchpads are not the result of damage during shipping.

 

Not true. The packaging is well done and good quality of foam used as well. There are 2 boxes as well. The first one is just to protect it from damaging (being thicker) and the second one is the standard Lenovo box, which in my opinion is nothing wrong with it, quite firm.

So no, nothing to do with the packaging, just the quality check / control at the final stage is not very good. Probably because they have too much demand, they are not keeping up with the orders and to speed up the process, they skip few problems here and there. Maybe I am a bit skeptical by the way the system should be built, that is where I appreciate SONY very much; you pay a little bit more and they make sure that those systems are in 100% perfect condition, no questions asked.

 

Here is my 3dmark...this was on the middle setting, performance mode, I don't have pro, just basic so its the only one I could do. Stock settings with a Samsung 840 pro HDD, no swap file on HDD, 16GB mSATA is used solely for the swap file. P4514 for those who cant open attachment.



I remembered I had changed a few settings when I was playing with the settings in DragonAge2. I went to the control panel and restored all defaults, and restarted the computer. Here is the result I came up with: (P4540)


Just to see how it would react, I ran it with base clock +100MHz using nvidiaInspector. Results were a bit better than I expected: (P4800)


And a final one, with nvidiaInspector pushing the base clock up by the max 135MHz: (P4902)

 

So how did you set up the 16 GB SSD for swap? Is that to free up the space on the 840 pro and give a bigger swap file?

 

Yes, it is to free up space, although I usually don't store much for music or movies on my laptop so space has never really been a huge concern for me. You go into the virtual memory settings and tell it to use the amount of space you designate on the drive you designate. The drive isn't as fast as the 840 pro, but now I freed up some space on my hdd, and also freed up the IO on that bus and the only IO on the bus with the mSATA is for the swap drive. Ideally its not as large as it should be (generally want the swap file 2-3x the amount of ram you have), but it will work. So far this computer is a beast with this ssd in it.

 

GREAT info them 750m are impressive, Can't wait mines on the truck for Delivery...

 

I figured I'd pop-in and give my input. I bought a Y500 on April 3rd (I think)? and saw the 700M series coming out so I returned it with no issues. When the 700M series rolled out, I bought the 750M SLI edition as soon as it came out. I just got the laptop today and I am on it as we speak. To say this laptop is amazing is an understatement. Hopefully, someone could answer this question: Would it be safe to overclock this laptop?

 

I dont know about the temps, but the case gets awfully hot when even using one gt750m. I was playing tf2 for 2 hours, and the left side of the case next to the fan and the keyboard got uncomfortably hot. Do people notice that region getting hot for them or is that only me.

But I dont know single thing about overclocking so dont mind me

 

I've been toying with this laptop for three hours and it hasn't been hot at all and it has been on my lap. This is with the dual 750's (SLI), too.

How did you get a 256GB SSD for your Y500?


Side note: How do I change my signature? I feel dumb.

 

I bought one and put it in then put windows 7 on the laptop....not a huge fan of windows 8. Took the 1tb hdd out and put it in a usb3 enclosure.

 

Should I get a 256GB mSATA and keep the 1TB ?

 

it gets fairly hot when playing heavy games. that's normal. it also gets hot on the palmrest. when browsing and not gaming it just gets warm after awhile.

i would love to see the temps of 750m's on 3dmark11. the highest score i reached with my 650m's is 4500+. i'm worried to push it further.

 

Link me and I'll go do it for you, haha.

 

could you guys with 750m's play farcry 3 ultra settings for like 2 hours and record the temps? it's with farcry 3 that my y500 is hottest, especially the processor. hotter than playing crysis 3, bf3 or metro 2033. thanks!:thumbsup:

 

Gladly would if I had the game. I can do Saints Row 3 ? :/

 

Well its nice and cool with no load. But yea atleast it gets hot in a place my hands arent going to touch.

 

Saints Row 3 is 10 min from finishing. I'm going to play that then report back w/ results.

 

A full size drive like the Samsung 840 pro is going to be faster than a mSATA. That being said, the mSATA will be much faster than your 1tb drive, and allow you to have a high amount of storage on your laptop. Kind of your call on that one.

 

Was just wondering, for the people who switched out their 16gb ssd for a larger one. How hard is it, installing it and getting the OS to run from it as well. Was looking at a 256gb Samsung ssd, from what I've researched its one of the best.

 

Also I read on another thread on here ( couldn't find it ), that the y500 indeed has SATA 3 ports for the hard drives, so it would be in my best interest to get a SATA 3 ssd instead for a msata for the boot drive.

 

I did and it's awesome. Going to put the 16gb one into an Acer Chromebook. I bought the crucial 256 gb one off Amazon for just under $200

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

There is one SATA III connection (the 1tb HDD) and one mSATA (the 16GB). The 1tb is in a cage, it was quite easy to change it out. I just took the 1tb out of the cage, screwed the ssd in, and slid the cage back in. Installing the OS was just fine, if you are installing windows 7 instead of 8, you have to change the bios to run legacy OS being its not UEFI. Other than that, its just like installing any OS fresh. Just need to take a handful of screws out of the bottom, remove the ultrabay drive, then carefully pry the whole bottom off and everything is right there for you.

 

So, I was looking at the Samsung 840 pro 256gb SATA 3 ssd for upgrade. So if I would get this ssd, it would replace the 1tb hdd and not the 16gb ssd?

 

It's say it's moderate difficulty since the cover doesn't just pop off like previous laptops I've seen. It's 9 or so screws and the video demo on Youtube doesn't even come close to showing how to get the clips to unhook. You WILL break a clip or two is all I can say, and you might not even realize it. It's no big deal because there are like 8 clips and only the first one will break.

Here's a small tutorial of what I did:

-Get a copy of Windows 8(not pro) on a CD. Either borrow it from a friend or download it somewhere. Don't bother asking Lenovo, they will try and sell it to you for $80. Microsoft will not help you at all because it's OEM.
-Position so that the bottom cover is up, battery is on top, resulting in ultrabay being to the left.
-remove battery
-remove ultrabay
-remove all screws
-now the hard part - you have to disengage a clip somewhere to get things started. The clips in the middle top are the smallest but it's also the flimsiest part of the bottom cover. I chose to start at the upper right. Once I got that clip off(yes it broke) the rest undone fairly easily. All I can say is take your time and be careful.
-The mSata port is on the bottom edge, a little right from the center.
-replace or insert your drive
-boot to bios
-in the bios, you have to change the boot mode to legacy support and boot priority to UEFI first. This will force to boot from the SSD.
-Insert a Windows 8 install disk and boot from it. It will install to the SSD and you're good to go. Don't worry about a CD key because it's embedded into the bios. Also, it must be Windows 8 and not Windows 8 pro.
Optional:
-Use Gparted and shrink your 1TB partition to as low as possible and preserve the original OS. Then partition the remainder however you like. I chose 100GB for Programs and 750GB for media
-In Win 8, go to drive manager and hide the original boot partition and recovery partition. All you have to do is remove the drive letter. Google it if you don't know how - it's easy
-Now you have your "factory settings" preserved, in case you ever decide to sell it but want to take the mSata with you

The beauty of Win 8 is the embedded Product key in the bios. Windows doesn't seem to detect "significant hardware changes" like it used to. I have tried swapping my SSD from one Y500 to another(to test because I'm getting a replacement one soon). It boots perfectly fine and only needed to install the video drivers because I went from a 750M to a 650M. Theoretically you could bring this to a new machine and you could install all the needed drivers and go.

 

Taking your time and being gentle is key here. I didn't break any of the clips on my bottom cover. If it feels like you're forcing it too hard and its going to break, it probably will. Try it from different angles until you get all the clips to disengage. It sounds worse to do than it actually is.

 

You pretty much have to choose between space and speed. I chose space because I easily have 500GB of media and this is my primary PC. The speed of the mSata drive is plenty fast for me. My windows experience index jumped to not be the bottleneck, if that's worth anything. I think it was 7.9. Replacing the 1TB hard drive with a faster SSD would be marginally faster and probably more expensive IMO

 

From what you mentioning , I assuming your talking about a clean Windows 8 install instead for cloning your original hdd and doing it that way.

 

Also my boot time with the Crucial is about 14 seconds

 

I think that's were I confused myself, I tought there were 2 2.5 drive, I assumed the msata was the same as a 2.5 ssd. Noob mistake. Yeah and look at 500gb + ssd, they go for $500 plus.

 

Yes. No bloatware. You can get to all the drivers from the HDD in that driver partition Lenovo made.

 

Msata is a little bigger than your thumb and is as thick as a stick of ram. Similar to the port your Wifi card goes in

 

The only problem I've read or come across is actually getting a copy of Windows 8 and making it work. From other threads I've read, that seems to be the biggest problem.

 

Microsoft recently made it very difficult to download Windows 8. There used to be a generic code you could type into the download assistant to get a copy but it no longer works for some reason. You could torrent it but I have no clue if that's "legal". You technically own the product key which is imbedded in your laptop, so you're not really stealing anything by torrenting. Luckily I downloaded it when it first came out and had CD made.