Recommend a new Laptop please

Yes location is a bit of a problem the most readily available ones here seem to be Lenovo and Asus, the thought of being stuck with Win10 is scary ! so finding one with a downgrade to Win7 is possibly a must, thanks for pointing that factor out...

Another question though (might be a silly one) would all 2015-2016 laptops running Win10 be able to run Win7 ?

The reason I ask this is for example my 6yrd Sony that came with Win7 is unable to run to XP (well it can if you mess about with some 3rd party loader that adjusts the settings, so technically it can't without using that hack)

Thanks for the feedback on that mate... I found an online store here in PH that has a good range of Asus and MSI OS's being either Win8.1 or Win10, I could live with 8.1 (just) and the chances of those models being able to downgrade is quite high I would imagine.

Ebay I have had just as many bad experiences as I have had good ones, met some "interesting" characters also to say the lest with the buyer / seller collects arrangements, got a few funny and also weird stories but probably not appropriate to relate here.

Thanks for the tips and advice guys it is appreciated, I have used Win8.1 with the classic shell before and it was ok actually, so an 8.1 system I think (after looking at what is available and the speck) would be a more viable option than a Win7 one (there is only 2 I found in the MSI range anyway), as for Dell I have a pet hate for Dell going back what 10 years or so I had quite a few to repair and lets just say the restrictions placed on the systems at the time made repairs very awkward... dunno if that has change since then I never had one to repair since that time... ah apart from one that just needed a virus removed.

Yes removing the HDD or SSD to experiment is what I normally do anyway since I have spares lying about... I have never tried Linix Mint as yet but I do use Puppy Linux and run that from a flash drive loaded via the PenDrive menu loader software is it ? the drive boots into various essential tools and utilities the way I have it set up, it's pulled me out the brown stuff on a few occasions.

Anyway I am mulling through the list of what is available to me in this country and will post my short, short list so to speak once I find the time to compare them all, the damn budget has had to drop quite a bit though, the refrigerator died so had to buy a new one, got drunk and promised my step daughter a new push bike so that's 20,000 Peso less straight away *sigh*

Well after finding what looked to be a good range of MSI here it turns out it was just an affiliate site with the "Buy" buttons linking to various small retailers dotted around the islands that I wouldn't take the risk to trust... that left what was available to be very small... plus with MSI sold in the PH the warranty becomes void if you upgrade the HDD or RAM this only applies to the PH lol.

So looking back at Asus again now since they have over 100 official retailers here so it seems...

One problem is though it is not looking like I am going to get the spec I am looking for without it being a Win10 machine, yes could get a Win7 one and upgrade to SSD and up the RAM but the combination of other components like CPU and Graphics are not a match for what I am looking for ideally its either one or the other but not both...

Suppose I am going to have to read up a bit more about Win10, the biggest complaint seems to be the telemetry I gather that crap can be turned off though to an extent, so if that is the only major problem then I could cope with that.

Not keen on the Western world but it did have its advantages when you want to buy something specific unlike here... anyway the hunt continues but it's driving me nuts now (well more nuts than I am already) so going to leave it for a few days and let my brain cool off so to speak.