The Hunt for a New Laptop + My New Box Setup Process

I've probably mentioned this before (or maybe it was just in one of my still "in-draft-form" posts), but it's probably well and truly time that I set up a new machine. Actually, it's probably been time to do so for over a year now, but I've managed to get by with an increasingly large bunch of external hard drives and nasty hacks (i.e. command-line args + wrapper scripts) to make Blender 2.8 runnable (due to graphics driver bugs). But, as I'll soon explain, the reason why I haven't just gone out and gotten a new machine is not so much the money/cost aspect, but rather, the time + effort cost involved in hunting down a suitable machine, and then, SETTING IT UP.

Long time readers may recall the series of posts I did a few years back when I set up the current box - first spending weeks/months tweaking Windows 8 into submission, which lead to a 3-4 month unsuccessful "Linux Experiment" (which was nominally a dual-boot setup, that was an minor marathon in itself to set up). This time, I'm not currently hoping to do another Linux experiment (yet!  Until Microsoft's Windows 10 auto-updates drive me up the wall enough to start taking nuclear options...)

Anyway, with the Code Quest looming, matters have become a bit more pressing, as I'm not keen on lugging my current box over. (For one thing, I'd need to also lug a fragile external HD along with it, if I didn't want to wait several months until I could get all my photos off my camera; also, there are those hacks needed to run 2.8 (seriously inconvenient at times), and there's too much other stuff on this box that I don't want to be lugging around everywhere).

Originally, I'd been planning on getting my first desktop tower in years (with all the scope/capacity to put whatever high powered stuff in there, plus ample room for many racks of internal hard drives, a proper "silent" cooling system, and gazillions of top-mounted USB ports) for my main/daily-driver home-office workstation, and then a not-so-critical laptop that could be used on the go. (And, by "not-so-critical", I mean, I don't care soo much about max speed + max storage + max ram + graphics performance, since my tower can serve that role instead... of course that said, it'd still have to satisfy my selection criteria below still!)