laptop questions please help

[hyprvx]

Right now, I'm using a Toshiba Satellite C55. It's got a 2.16 GhZ Celeron, with 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive. It has a 15.6" screen at 1366x768, shipped with Windows 8.1, and I'm dualbooting Xubuntu 14.04.

CAD- My team uses Inventor. The 2015 version runs well, though having multiple things open bogs it down a bit. Blender on Xubuntu runs well though.

Driver Station- Runs absolutely perfectly. Only minor glitch is with my ethernet jack, but that's because VirtualBox has a strange internet driver. Haven't tried running the DS in Wine yet.

Programming- LabVIEW, WindRiver, and Eclipse run well. No complaints (save for the glitch in installing WindRiver on Windows 8 and later, which turned out to be a moot point since it's being dropped for 2015 :/)

Other things?- This thing is my primary computer. Firefox and Opera Next run perfectly fine, Steam runs with minimal issues, Team Fortress 2 is okay on low graphics, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is beautiful, osu! is perfect, and many small games work perfectly. Spotify works well, and VLC plays my videos. iTunes runs like iTunes (aka like crap). Can't complain.

It was a birthday gift, but it was still $300 well spent.

Toshiba also has this guy that should do everything much better and can have a touchscreen if you want that!

(I maaaay be a bit of a Toshiba fan.)

[KeatonM]

If you're doing CAD and trying to play games, I would NEVER recommend a Celeron processor. I also would say don't get a 15" display. I've owned a 17" laptop and it was bulky and awkward to use on anything except a desk - not mobile at all.

I browsed Newegg for a little while, which is 1 of 2 sites you should consider for PCs and PC parts, the other being TigerDirect, and came across this which seems to fit your budget and should be decent. I'm not a fan of the i5 over an i7, but the display is better than some 17" laptops I've seen at 1920x1080, and the RAM should be fine for gaming and CAD. To be honest, you'd be most likely to bottleneck on HDD speed, so you could consider updating to a 7200 RPM drive.

I've been a fan of ASUS laptops for a while now, so that's what the link is, but also consider the Dell Studio line.

Hope that helps.