So I'm currently looking at Laptops down the road (by down the road I mean the end of this year) to replace my school issued one (which I love) which I got back in 2011. It functions great and all and I've taken great care of it but I realize it will be aging and I'll need to get a new one.
Its a Dell Latitude E6420 with Windows 7 64-bit
Current Specs are:
Intel Core (2 Cores) i5-2520M @2.50 GHz
8.00 GB of RAM (just upgraded this recently to beef it up)
Nvidia NVS 4200M (512MB Dedicated Memory) (2282MB Total)
Direct X10
232GB Hard Drive (I own a 1TB Backup as well)
Suprisingly I've been able to run Starcraft II and Skyrim smoothly. Civilization games run great. I remember that Dell used to have the option to customize builds but they don't do that anymore disappointinly so. I'm not too big into gaming on PC but I do want something better than what I currently have so something with an i7 and at least 8GB RAM. A SSD would be nice too and space isn't an issue since I've got my whole TB HDD still practically empty.
I plan to primarily use it for coding, video editing, internet, and various other productivity uses.
Is there a particular brand I should look at? Dell, Hp, Alienware? Etc...