I'm in the market for a new laptop and I'm not super familiar with what the best brands/models currently are. I would like to be able to play current gen games on it, and I'll also be using it for work (I travel a lot so a laptop is a must as opposed to a desktop).

My current laptop is a nearly 5-year old Lenovo Y-500 that I've been pretty happy with but it's been showing it's age for a while now and I think it's time for a replacement. I'm tempted to stick with Lenovo but I've also heard that the company no longer has the same reputation it did 5 years ago.

The ballpark price I'm willing to spend is about $1000. I know that this isn't a great budget for a gaming laptop, but I really don't need it to be the latest and greatest thing. I'm OK with playing current gen games at lower graphics settings as long as I can play them (and I have the typical huge backlog of unplayed older Steam games as well). I also need it to have a number pad (this is essential, my job sometimes requires me to enter many numbers into spreadsheets).

In addition to the current Lenovo offerings in that price range (the Y520, Y700, and Y720), I'm looking at the Dell Inspirion 15 7000 Gaming series of laptops, which also has some offerings within my budget. I've read reviews that seem to suggest that the Inspirion laptops seem to perform quite well for the price.

If anyone has any comments on either of those brands (or any of the specific models), that'd be great. Any other suggestions would also be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Well, the Dell's sound nice, but after reading some posts online it sounds like they've been having problems with BIOS updates for the past few months that render their computers inoperable. Sounds like they're a good company to stay away from at the moment...

Can’t tell you about laptops, but I’d put off getting any Intel CPU until the next major refresh. Right now you’d be taking a 20% performance haircut because of a major CPU bug they fixed in microcode a month ago (the microcode patch had stability problems so this might be the Dell issues people are talking about).

Intel claims the next iteration will have an improved fix in hardware.

That's a good point. Any idea when the next iteration will be out? Some google searching seems to indicate sometime this year? I can probably put up with the laptop I've got for at least that long.

They are slowly trying to get back up with decent screens, physical mouse buttons, better heat management. It's just that outside the T, P, X series, the quality isn't that great. The P series has a number pad and Quadro P500 which is similar to a GeForce MX150.

Have you considered a eGPU set up?