What's a good laptop to buy?..

For the past decade or so I’ve been leasing a laptop through the education department and its been a pretty good deal. A new laptop every 3 years with full warranty and insurance all for about $11.50 per fortnight.

But they’ve increasingly been making it more difficult with this laptop. Now we have to take the machine in and hook it up to the network to ‘activate’ the various licences every 3 months, we no longer get the Adobe products for free (my main incentive to have this laptop) and a few other things.

So, if I were to simply go out and buy a new laptop for myself, what sort of specs would I be looking for…?

One essential requirement is that it has a CD/DVD player as much of my software, including my CS6 Photoshop, is on CD/DVD (no, I’m not going to pay $50.00 per month for Adobe’s CC version when I have a perfectly good copy of the same thing here on CD). It’ll need a decent amount of RAM – my current laptop has 8Gb which works great, and a decent sized HDD (my current one only has a 128Gb SSD of which 90Gb is taken up with OS and other education dept. software. I have to use an external 1Tb drive to store my stuff). It needs to hook up to an external 23″ monitor.

But otherwise what sort of processor and other specs should I be looking for? Any brand name notably better than another? I currently have a HP and its works fine as far as I’m concerned. Budget is around the $Aus500 – $Aus1500 mark