Take a look at OWC drives, they make very good ones. Also the Crucial SSD are very compatible and fast.

It's been found that their is nothing wrong by design, although reapplying a better paste couldn't hurt, with the temperatures. Migration Assistant tends to mess things up and also Amazon has stated that they have a bug in the Upload to Kindle process that causes a never ending BASH script to run continuously driving up the temperatures. I killed the Bash script and de-installed Send to Kindle and my temp during idle never exceed 97 deg F not when they were at 130 deg F. Also on the Apple support forum there is a thread (search for Bash using up lots of cpu) that states that during Migration Assistant it messes up the CUPS process as well leaving stalled printer and fax queues. I ran the internal CUPS web service, found 2 stalled items, killed them both and now my rMBP actually can sit on my laptop and can still feel the cool of the metal case.

Make an appointment with the Genius bar at your closest Apple store. Looks like a screen replacement is required. Good news, you get the entire panel with a new backlight. Bad news, if your out of AppleCare warranty, drops aren't covered unless you bought it from Best Buy and paid the million dollars for their extended warranty.

Also remember that once you do that the MAC will loose it's memory of the battery charge curves. To teach it you should do a full charge, then unplug and do a full discharge until the mac shuts down. Then let it alone for 2 hours for the battery to settle. Charge it with the Mac off until the green light lights. Unplug, wait 1 hour and then turn it on, plug in the power adapter and the mac now knows how long it takes to charge the battery and it's capacity.

Check the status of the internal button BIOS battery. Also make sure that at least the power light is on when the power adapter is plugged in.

Do yourself a favor, get the 1TB WD Black Edition not the blue (I'm glad you didn't say Green!). The Black has 2 processors on board instead of just one and also has twice the cache and has predictive seek algorithms. I tried a raid of Blues (640G) on my VMWare server and it was OK. Just for kicks I replaced the raid with the exact same amount of drives but the only difference was that I went from the Blue 640's to the Black Edition 640's. VMWare took off like it was on steroids! I replace my Apple HD with the 2.5 Black Edition and the same thing happened. The only other thing that was even more pronounced was when I pulled out the WD Black and put in the Crutial RealSSD 120G solid state drive. 15 second boot times and instantaneous app launches.

No, but as the sdapter is a MagSafe, that means that any little jar can knock it temporarily loose before the magnet reengages. Normally this little jostle doesn't even get reported by the Mac. But without a battery you will be going down!

Check the battery health buy downloading Coconut Battery (freebee). Also check in Apple/About this Mac/Info and look for your battery manufacturer. If it says Sony then Apple has a real bad batch of Sony supplied batteries. It's not a recall, but it you take it to Genius bar, they will run a special diagnostic (I think they just check it's serial against their secret serial list) and if it's on their you get a new one. Those batteries have been known to swell and even explode. I took my 2.5 year old battery *really out of warranty* but only had 40 cycles on it that wouldn't hold a charge. He checked the diagnostics, reached behind him, pulled out a brand new battery *this one is made by SMC*, handed me back the MBP and said thanks for coming in. No charge, no issues. So check out the battery.