need advice on good windows 7 laptop.

I'm in the USA east coast. I'll avoid ebay and the refurbs. :) and dell. I'm thinking HP maybe. thanks for the feedback.

Last week I finally ordered the Lenovo Thinkpad P70 (17.1" screen) I've been waiting to be able to order for the past 6 months. The new P50/P70 line was announced earlier this year and has finally become available.

These are NOT low-end inexpensive machines. In fact quite the opposite.

But if you're looking for a serious laptop/workstation with latest hardware, serious graphics choices with DP/HDMI external connectors, FHD or UHD laptop screen (optionally with Touch), internal 2-bay PCIe M.2 SSD support (for PCIe SSD RAID configuration if you need it), internal SATA3 HDD/SSD storage bay plus optical drive bay (which can be used for second HDD/SSD instead), optional built-in X-Rite color calibrator for the screen, serious capability, up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, i7-6700HQ or i7-6820HQ and non-ECC memory, or Xeon E3-1505M and ECC memory, etc., one of these could be for you. Win10 or optional downgrade rights to Win7 Pro x64 pre-installed.

Again, these are NOT low-end inexpensive machines. And for some reason Lenovo's initial pricing for some of the significant upgrades (i.e. additional memory and HDD/SSD storage) leads one to probably opt-out of getting them from Lenovo and instead just going with the "standard built-in $0 extra charge storage components and then buying these more competitively priced and commercially available extras and installing them yourself. Better pricing, better choice, better value, if you buy and install these memory and extra storage items yourself.

I've had my Lenovo Thinkpad W530 for 3 years and I love it. Lenovo made some bad decisions in their next W540, W541 and W550s machines. But with these latest P50/P70 products I'd have to say "they're back!". I also put friends and family who want to replace aging desktop machines into Lenovo's M93p desktops. Again, I recommend going with $0-cost standard storage and doing the memory/HDD/SSD upgrade yourself rather than buying those from Lenovo.

I've never been let down with Lenovo support, including ONSITE warranty hardware service (i.e. visits to my home from locally contracted service technicians) in the rare occasions where something's failed as well as phone tech support.

For the past few years I only buy Lenovo.

I was a computer engineer/network engineer so comtrash and packard hell were on my blacklist.
Then gateway and then dell drifted in there also. I have an Intel Pentium Acer Aspire that does all I
need it to do. It has a crappy GMA but I don't game or graphics or photos so all is great.
(oh, I could have added more to the blacklist but can't remember them all. )