Advice on new laptop?

[ark]

I think it's time to retire my now-11-year-old laptop and buy something new. The old machine is a Dell Precision M6600 (Intel i7-2820QM processor) that was one of the fastest available at the time, but is pretty paltry by today's standards.

I had thought about replacing it with the current equivalent, namely a Precision 7770, but this video argues persuasively, I think, that the 7770 has serious power-supply and cooling problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68rCeK3l0Os

I've been reasonably satisfied with Dell's service, and would like to stick with them unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. Looking through their offerings, it seems like the most sensible alternative is the XPS 17, which also seems to be quite a commonly used machine in the Ableton forums. At least one video has mentioned that this machine also has cooling problems, but those problems can be avoided almost entirely simply by putting the machine on a stand so that there is more airflow into the vents on the bottom.

So...I wonder whether other people on this list have used the XPS 17, especially the current version, and have any words of wisdom that they might offer, either about this machine or its alternatives.

PLEASE DO NOT ADVISE ME TO GET A MAC! I think Apple makes superb products, but there are at least three reasons I think this is a bad idea for me in my current circumstances:

1) I have a Nord Modular G2 keyboard. The (essential) support software for this machine does not run on Apple silicon, period.

2) More generally, every time Apple comes out with a new version of MacOS, I see a flood of complaints about how people can't use it until some piece of software on which they depend has been updated. Microsoft may have their problems, but they seem to care much more about backward compatibility.

3) My other computer is a Windows desktop machine. My workflow is to get music ready for performance on that machine, then transfer the relevant files to the laptop. This is easy to do because I keep identical copies of (almost) everything on both machines. If one was a PC and the other was a Mac, I would not be able to do this. You might say that I should just use the one machine; but then, if it were stolen or damaged, I would lose everything until I could get it repaired or replaced and had time to restore everything from backups.

So...If you can tell me something useful from personal experience about the XPS, or suggest alternatives, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks!

[DunedinDragon]

I have a reasonably similar setup with a PC and a laptop. The laptop is primarily used on stage and has a subset of the software used on my main PC. In my case I've had very positive experiences with ASUS equipment as both my desktop and laptop are ASUS units. I think the key factor here is what are you using the laptop for? I don't demand the same things from my laptop as I do my desktop unit so my desktop is much more loaded with memory and SSD drives. My laptop (an ASUS Vivobook with 17.3" screen, 10th gen intel 4-core i7-1065G7 3.9 ghz, 24gb RAM, 2TB PCIe SSD) and would best be characterized as a high powered business laptop with a high speed processor and plenty of memory and storage, but not so much gaming type stuff and it works flawlessly every week on stage running live production and automation tracks with my band. In my case I freeze and flatten all of my Ableton music tracks into individual .WAV files and those are run on the laptop in scenes so the processing demands are much lower with far less possibilities of glitches and problems from plugins.