I have a similar experience. I despise everything HP, but their lineup of laptops from the past year has been pretty good. I love my HP pavilion 15T power. Go

I have a similar experience. I despise everything HP, but their lineup of laptops from the past year has been pretty good. I love my HP pavilion 15T power. Got a 4GB GTX1050, HQ series i5 and an SSD in a laptop for ~$600. Hasn't given me any problems so far. my only complaint is the difficulty of getting the right drivers for Linux. But it worked eventually.