My laptop is no more. It is an ex-laptop

The best treatment for a rechargable battery is to normally run it flat and then fully charge it. As such I will run the laptop on battery until the 10 minute warning comes on, then run it off the charger until we switch off, the last battery lasted 3 years, this is into it's second.

When we bought my daughter a laptop we looked at lenovo's but found them expensive for the spec and flimsy, she ended up with a HP that has lasted the 18yr old "it's indistructable test" quite well.

Do yourself a favour when you get new hardware and get rid of the bloatware. It's unnecessary and slows things down quite a lot.

I've not read too many positive reviews regarding win8 on laptops. Anybody?

Not for me. Windows 8 is crap.

It is like a tiles app heavy phone screen lying on top of the normal windows desktop. Whenever you select anything technical, like the control panel tile it flips back to the normal windows screen. Very weird.

Which one did you get David?

If you can't get the mousepad to scroll up/down you need to place 2 fingers on the pad slightly apart and move them up and down. I usually reserve that gesture for driving, but it took me some working out. The mousepad is annoying in the fact that it does so much tap and drag from top brings down a menu, from the right brings in another menu and tap and drag from the left flips between the last things you were working on. It gets annoying when all you want to do is move the mouse around the screen and you have different things popping up.

If you have the problem with win8 failing to carry out the updates let me know and I'll talk you through the fix.

I agree with Leigh, the manufacturer's pre-installed software slows things. I fitted a 256Gb Solid State Drive drive to my 3 year old Toshiba laptop and it boots up, goes through the log-in and is ready to use within 30 seconds. I have had Win 8 for the last 6 months and use it just like Win 7 without bothering with the tiles screen. The only issue is no Start menu as per 7, and the shutdown route is via the 'charm' to the right of the screen but otherwise it's business as usual with W8 still running PaintShopPro I bought in 2002.
The new tile interface works ok if you have a tablet or touch screen and it works well in my opinion on the new Lumia phones etc. but for normal mouse work, forget it, just stick to the classic desktop.
A feature I do like about W8 is that via my Live email account everything syncs with my Lumia 920, and if I go onto a computer with W8 and log in using my Live email account as a new user, then the computer automatically sets up the desk top the same as my main laptop and syncs everything for me.
If you were a user of Windows Live Mail or add-ons like Movie Maker, then these no longer come installed in W8 but you can download them from the Windows Live Essentials site.

I've got the z585 coming. Slightly lower spec than you but I'm not into gaming or anything needing massive power.

The touchpad comments were about my old Toshiba laptop that I have fallen back on in the interim, after HP motherboard failure. I was infuriated by the auto scrolling on the touchpad and didn't relise I could have turned it off! DOH!

I've already heard about the update problem, so we may be chatting when I get it.

Mine is the good ole Thinkpad type Lenovo. As elegant as Vanessa Feltz and about the same weight.
Bullet proof construction though: The Landrover Defender of the IT world.

I have been known to do a bit of killing on the laptop, but that is mainly reserved for the PS3 now. Did some saving of the world on COD today.

I mainly bought the spec for HD video crunching.