I'm actually a big fan of the Y500s. Solidly built, well specced and good value. Not the highest spec, but good enough, which is all you can reasonably ask of a laptop. As I said, they're not the highest spec. The processor is excellent, and you've got plenty of RAM, and it has a 1080p screen, and a caching/OS SSD, the only bit where it falls down, and i must emphasise this is only slightly, is the graphics card. The 650M is about as good as you're going to get without spending another thousand dollars, but it's going to struggle to run most new games on high settings, especially as your screen is 1920x1080, instead of the usual laptop 1366x768. That said, I'd take the 1080 screen any day. So basically, right now, for the money, it's about as good as you're going to get from a very good brand. So, if you can't get a desktop, and you're unwilling to wait ~6 months for Haswell (intel's new CPUs, with integrated GPUs that are supposed to be on par with the 650m) and the next round of mobile graphics, you should probably just go ahead and spend your money.