If you can live with the thought of not buying "new", I would suggest you take a look at Thinkpads, specifically those which were leased to a business, but wher

If you can live with the thought of not buying "new", I would suggest you take a look at Thinkpads, specifically those which were leased to a business, but where the lease was broken before term was over. These can be had at about a year of age, and the come in good shape. You can get an i7 Haswell with 65W TDP (and if you clean it once a year, the CPU will not be throttled before you start to undress) and an Nvidia Chip with 1440p 15.5" screen for under 1000$ if you look hard. As you say you are form Europe, you might be able to order from Luxnote (not affiliated, just trying to keep the market for servicable laptops from collapsing), which are based in Germany. Expect to supply your own SSD, and make sure the Wifi modem has Bluetooth if you need that, as well as support for the standards you need. If you want to use the internal antenna(s) for cellular modem, make sure to try and get that with the laptop when you buy, as the BIOS is a little restrictive in which PCIe devices it will accept. In some cases that can apparently be fixed by hacking it, but caveat emptor. Some models have two batteries, one fixed and one swappable, others only one swappable. The former allows trivial swapping while running, the latter would require you to use some sort of 20V-ish supply capable of providing at least 45W via the charging port, if you want to change the battery without loosing whatever is in ram. If you care for safety and do not like fuzzing around with things breaking/being unreliable, beware of unofficial batteries. They might well refuse to charge, though the Laptop generally runs on anything that leads it's battery controller to deem further discharge to be safe for laptop and battery. If your performance demands would not be that high, you could get a somewhat older, but rather solid Thinkpad, you'd be surprised by the price/performance ratio for even some as old as e.g. an X60s, which is one of the few which allow the ME to be fully disabled. Those are available for a very good price on Ebay, but the issue is that they only feel fast if the software is fast, and judging from your described subjective feel of speed, your software is not fast. I hope you get a good one. And try to not freak out about the mentioned Numpad on the newer T5xx ones, as they just put the available width to use. If you can get the hang of the trackpoint, they still have the best, as far as I know. At least my Thinkpad makes me use it sometimes, while I don't even bother trying with the HP Elitebook.