Total budget and country of purchase: Looking for something around the $1000 mark. Can be a bit more or less for the right features. Purchasing from a US university.

Do you prefer a 2 in 1 form factor, good battery life or best specifications to your requirements for the money? Pick or include any that apply. Best specifications and reasonable battery life are important.

How important is weight to you? Medium importance. Will sometimes travel with it.

Which OS do you require? Windows, Linux, Mac. Windows 10

Do you have a preferred screen size? If indifferent, put N/A. 15"

Are you doing any CAD/video editing/photo editing/gaming? List which programs/games you desire to run. If you have no requirements, put N/A. Doing some large imaging data processing and vector graphic design for scientific purposes. Likely would need a powerful CPU and at least 16 GB RAM. NVIDIA GPU would also be nice but not essential. No gaming.

If you're gaming (leave blank if you put N/A above...), do you have certain games you want to play? At what settings and FPS do you want?

Any specific requirements such as good keyboard, reliable business grade build quality, touch-screen, finger-print reader, optical drive or good input devices (keyboard/touchpad)? Good keyboard with number pad is an absolute must, touchpad is irrelevant (always use a mouse). SSD with at least 256GB required, 512GB would be nice. AT LEAST three USB ports are required, and ideally a standard D-SUB VGA port. Don't care about other bells and whistles.

Leave any finishing thoughts here that you may feel are necessary and beneficial to the discussion. I've been using a very cheap Acer Aspire laptop since early 2012 and it is no longer up to the task. The keyboard was giving me intermittent trouble from the beginning and I'm ready for a high quality laptop keyboard, with specs that will serve me well for another 3-4 years.