Hi,

Well this is my first ever laptop purchase since my old Dell Inspiron 1300 back in 2005 (still kicking till this day, and still the best laptop I have owned) I purchased this laptop as a desktop replacement and I have a few problems and some general questions I wanted to clear up, and was wondering if you guys could help?

1) Dead Pixel

I only realized this a few days ago when I was looking at a white screen and on the right hand side of the screen there is a single dead pixel and it is extremely annoying. Somebody mentioned massaging this pixel and that it might start working however I'm not exactly sure how and wouldn't want to break the whole screen getting down and dirty, lol.

2) BF3 8fps & Sound Delay

I installed Battlefield 3 and when I tried to actually play the first mission I realized that the FPS dramatically dropped to around 5-8fps and there was an audio delay of around 1-2 seconds. I tried all kinds of graphic settings but the result was the same. The game works 100% on my gaming rig @ around 100FPS on Ultra. I also realized that the menu screen began to lag and stays this way. Another thing that came to my attention was that whilst in the menu screen you hear the same music twice back to back within a second of each other. Any suggestions?

3) Windows 8 on new HDD

I absolutely hate Windows 8 however my Windows 7 disc is OEM so no chance in using it parallel with my desktop (legally anyway) so I'm stuck with Windows 8 for now. I would like to take my 256 Vector SSD from my desktop and install it onto the laptop as the main boot drive. I want to make a fresh install of Windows 8 as I've made a mess of things and settings trying to understand how it all works (how long did it take for you guys to figure out where the shutdown button was? :D)

My question is, how do I get Windows 8 to install onto the new HDD as I can't recall ever receiving a W8 disc with the laptop? I can't find a product key anywhere either. I'd rather not mirror the drive, I've had bad experiences in the long run with mirrored drives.

4) hand over touchpad brings up start menu and loads up apps

This one is the worst, but I'm not sure if this is W8 related or not. When browsing the internet (FireFox) - notably when typing something, and your palm 'hovers' above the touchpad something weird happens and windows goes into Start mode and shows all the apps then loads up Skype or something random as such. I've tried purposefully to replicate this but I can't. It only seems to happen accidentally.

Does this laptop have a start button feature inbuilt into the touchpad or something? No I'm not pressing the start key on the keyboard. It's also weird because it selects an app to start. This happens maybe 6-7 times a day and at the end of the day I have 10 apps running in the background and it is extremely annoying.

Well so far in the 3 days I have actually used the laptop these are my issues with it. I hope to keep this laptop like my previous one for at least 5-7 years - By then it probably couldn't play any new games without being on low res/settings but hopefully it would have served me well. I doubt it could take anywhere near the same abuse my Dell has for the last 7 years though. The other day I dropped the dell down the stairs... continued working like a champ! Haha!

Thanks guys!