Time to upgrade.

I know I could reformat and reinstall and my current laptop would be fine, but it's had a hard life and deserves a break, so give me suggestions what I should buy.

I have a budget of about $1000. I need an optical drive, large ~16inch screen, not fussed about image quality (I don't do much with images).
Mostly I need it to be powerful when I want it to be (many tabs open, ripping a cd and then compiling a sketch and listening to music) and when I'm just browsing, I need it to be QUIET.
This is the bit the specs don't mention. Who has had a good experience with a laptop that the fan is rarely on, and maybe even SSD. Dual HD would be nice and sometimes in my price range.
Other features such as good speakers, touchscreen, etc are all desireable, but not essential.

And it needs to be tough, physically. My current Satellite Pro occasionally gets taken onto jobs and covered in dust, dropped, stowed behind a seat, has breadcrumbs and ketchup dropped on the keyboard etc.

I was looking at a gaming laptop such as an ASUS N550 (there's a few manufacturer refurbished on ebay that look good) but I'm not sure if they are quiet when not being maxed out.

Who has any suggestions, or warnings?

Thanks

After all these weird and wonderful wearables, there's still not one that REALLY solves any real problem.
They all need bluetooth tethering which too limited for anything other than wearing your phone anyway.

So.... here's my idea:
The watch has a SIM and a phone/data plan.
Watch can take and make calls either with bluetooth headset or loudspeaker.
Can receive messages.
Can send messages. No idea how current input is but I imagine you could write one letter at a time on the screen and OCR would recognise it.
Can receive emails, probably using an app where the email is parsed at the server and the watch only gets plain text and low res images.
Maybe send emails.

AND.... can tether.
So then you get home, tether your phone/tablet (by resting your watch on a wireless charger that also is a wifi booster) and your messages get synced and saved and you can see the full version of your emails.


This would mean a light phone user could get by with only the watch. But would be notified when an email came.
You could go on holidays with a watch and a Surface Pro, be out partying all day, make calls/text, and when you got an urgent business email you could grab the Surface and deal with it and then go back with empty pockets.

This watch could also be waterproof, so you can get caught in the rain/fall off a boat and not worry.


I'd buy this as a builder so I can leave my tablet in my truck while working, watch (or even minature fob watch in pocket, like a nokia phone designed for tethering) would do everything I need and when I need to read emails with supply documents I go to my truck.


What do you guys think?   Should I start a kickstarter?  Or am I only designing for myself?

So I have a really cool idea for a website (I think it is anyway) and basic web skills.

This is what it might look like http://www.jsongs.comuv.com/

So, songwriters load demo songs, they get their own page with the songs on them and each song gets it's own page.
That can be done in HTML. I don't predict will get too big so it won't be too hard to manually manage.
BUT on the homepage, it wants a shuffle music player so people listening to a song can skip until they find something they like.
Which means that the song need to be in a database so that they can be shuffled then the corresponging song, songname, artist and artist pic can be dynamically loaded.
I can handle the Javascript (just) but then I need PHP or somthing to work the database.
I was hoping to work out something that will run on an Access database since I have enough troubles without SQL.

Can someone point me in the right direction on which set of languages to use?
Keep in mind that, if it is successful, I want it so that artists still have to be manually set up and screened, but after that they can add songs easily and the song pages will be dynamically created.

Thanks,
Fred