Tips on Buying a Lenovo from Japan?

Here's the short version:

The Thinkpad Edge E435 AMD A10-4600M, AND a discrete Radeon HD 7470M, which allows for all kinds of lovely Hybrid Crossfire-y shenanigans, all inside of a 13.3 x 9.2 x 1.1 inch package, all for $690, tax included. Only drawback is that the Fn key is in the bottom-left corner, instead of Ctrl, but I think I can live with that.... maybe.

It's only sold in Japan. Something to do with how Westerners value huge screens and raw horsepower in our laptops over everything else. Therefore, I'm putting out a call for help. What should I know about buying a laptop that's marketed exclusively to another country, if anything at all?

source: Lenovo E435 & E535 laptops | Netbook Review, notebook review, tablet review, PC review

 

That can be swapped in the BIOS.

 

There is all sort of proxy site that help you buy from Amazon.co.jp or yahoo jp auction. Though the premium is kinda of steep : usually 8%+ of the item price for handling and international shipping.

Not sure about the warranty though.

 

Awesome. One less thing to worry about. Do they instruct you to swap the keycaps too, or do you just pretend that it is what it is according to the BIOS?

New thing: Is the discrete graphics soldered in, or upgradable? Anyone know? Turns out the MSI GX60 that was shown off at Computex had a bigger discrete card... I wouldn't mind upgrading it myself for that.

 

The dGPU version of the laptop actually comes with a different motherboard that has the dGPU chip on it, you cannot upgrade it.

I'm curious though as why do you want to buy this laptop that bad that you are willing to go through the trouble to purchase it from Japan. Trinity doesn't allow OC which is a huge advantage of Llano so CPU performance continues to trail behind Intel, in fact according to notebookcheck the A10-4600M's performance is only on the same level as the last generation Core i3-2310M. Yes the integrated 7660G is better than HD4000, but not significantly, in Anadatech's review HD4000 actually won some benchmarks. The dedicated HD7470M is also very weak for a dGPU (roughly the same performance as HD4000/HD7660G), and you can't count on hybrid CFX because AMD never worked out the problem caused by crossfire two different GPUs. When I had my Llano APU based HP I have to turn off crossfire to make games playable, otherwise the micro stuttering will drive you crazy. My point is, for the money you are willing to spend you can easily get a different Thinkpad available in the US. When I looked at Lenovo's B&N Gold site, even though there is no sale going on right now, for $644 plus tax you can get the much better built T430 with Ivy Bridge i5-3210M plus dedicated Nvidia NVS 5400M graphics card (about twice as fast as the 7470M).

 

Check if the machine type has warranty coverage wherever you are. Based on what you wrote it may not be the case.

Lenovo Support - International Warranty Services (US)