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

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who know trinary.

@renegade I challenge you to find another base system which has the series 1,  [another number] and 10.

As for how they're spoken, I don't know.
Although I would imagine Octal is spoken like the decimal it looks like  e.g. 27oct would be Twenty-Seven, octal.

Hex is annoying because it can't be spoken in a lot of cases so it has to be spelled out.

Decimal is annoying because people keep saying things like 'a couple' 'a dozen' 'a grand'
Not to mention plumber's numbers where $150 turns out to be really $375.