I’m in pretty much the same boat. My past 2 laptops have been dell inspirons with a touchscreen. I use the touch screen for game programming to make sure touch events work. The one I got was $500, but probably should have gone a bit higher.

It has a i5 processor 16gb ram, 1 tb ssd. It does indeed run tf2, guild wars 2, and other not graphically intensive games. I’m satisfied and it does work well, but below are some of the negatives of my new laptop vs my old.

It’s missing key backlights, a fingerprint to unlock, and the bodyvis much more plastic and feels not as secure as my wife’s lenovo.

Be sure to check out pics for keyboard arrangement. My new laptop has a numberpad…which is nice, but the arrow keys got shrunk which is not nice for programming.

Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.

I picked money up from amazon.

Second for godot!