I've had a whole lot of laptops over the past 30 years. My experience has been primarily with laptops that could survive our living on a sailboat while sailing halfway around the world and handling everything in our lives. Portability for the first twenty years wasn't quite as important as robustness. Now, portability, i.e. weight and size, is more important to me.
The very expensive laptops are great for work, but considering the rapid technological advances I wouldn't buy a very expensive laptop that is going to be less-than wonderful two years down the road.
Your travel plans will probably be most important with respect to the kind of laptop you want. Will they be extended travel exceeding one or two months? I mean lots of plane/train/auto traveling with many stops along the way. If so, you might want to consider a very light and portable laptop, say a Microsoft Surface. You give up a lot of storage and speed with one, though. However, flash drives and external hard drives can augment such a laptop beautifully along with backup capabilities which are even more important when traveling.
If your travel is the shorter vacation-trip type, you might want to consider trying a tablet first – you can get a Kindle Fire for as little as $50.00. I especially like mine for long plane trips where I can load lots of books to read.
Will you be traveling outside the US and dependent upon WiFi in hotels, etc.? If so, not only should your security software need to be close to bullet-proof, but you should probably not access bank accounts, etc., while traveling. Additionally, if your travel will include cruise ships, I wouldn't count on good and/or safe access to your accounts, so a smart phone might be all you'd want to take with you on those trips. If, on the other hand your travel would be more of the long stays in one place, i.e. renting a house or apartment for 1+ months at a time, a laptop that handles all your needs (financial, archival, video etc.) is best.
As impatient as I may be, I don't think one needs the fastest processor on the block for personal computing, so you could do okay with a processor speed around 2.5 gHz, and as much as I'd love 16 Gigs of RAM, 4 to 8 gigs is probably enough, which will keep the price down. I have an ASUS laptop now, and it’s pretty good for most of my needs, especially now that I’ve gotten rid of Windows 8. My favorite laptop, though, has been the SONY Vaio series – I’ve owned 3 of them and was always happy with them, and probably will get another one when this ASUS dies.
I have tablets for most short-stay travel, foregoing access to bank accounts, financial transactions, etc. I use it for reading, email, and rely on my phone for texting. Since most of our travel is international, we do more texting than phoning while overseas, more checking in on Facebook than emailing, and no complicated stuff like video/photo editing while traveling.
Rather than go on any longer, I’ll close for now. I’ll answer any questions you might have.
