In the Market For a Sturdy Work/Gaming Laptop

Hi all!

I'm going to get a laptop that I can use for work so that I can do my writing while at my office (and gaming at conferences), and I need some recommendations on models that are a. NOT HP (which have given me fits the last 2 laptops I had from them) and b. sturdy enough to get taken on trips to conferences. While I'd love to have some souped up gaming rig, my budget is really capped out at about $1700.

I run some pretty specific programs when writing: mainly, Office 2010 and Dragon Naturally Speaking (great speech to text program), which needs the following:

Windows 7 or 8 (I actually like 8 after I found the little start button app)

"Recommend minimum 2 GB for 32-bit Windows 7, Windows 8 and 8.1, 4 GB for 64-bit Windows 7, 8" and "We recommend 2.2 GHz Intel^® dual core or equivalent AMD processor. Faster processors yield faster performance."

and, "

• A sound card supporting 16-bit recording
• A DVD-ROM drive for installation from disk
• An Internet connection for automatic product activation (a quick anonymous process)
• Note: Supports Microsoft^® Office 2010 and 2013. Does not support dictation directly into Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. For EMR support, please use Dragon Medical Edition."

Since some conferences have certain lectures that we all go to, but are ungodly boring, I also need a laptop that can game. I'd also like to be able to take the laptop downstairs at night if hubby goes to bed early--that way I can game without disturbing him as much. So, I need a good dedicated graphics card. I'm OK with needing to have a separate DVD or an additional external hard drive for extra space, but I'd prefer to have as much as possible in one machine.

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks. :)

$1700 is a huge budget.

Adding an optical drive adds more thickness. Not sure where from, but these are in Canada. To give you an idea for a system.

You can get external slim dvd drive for $30. The MSI is much slimmer with SSD for OS and most played games which should be enough. 2nd drive to store your files and work on.

MSI GS70 2PC-036US Stealth i7 4700HQ 12GB 750GB 128GB SSD 17.3in FHD GTX860M 2GB Win8.1 Notebook

It's a huge budget, but I have to be able to do some hefty imaging for some of the writing work I do. Plus, I want to game on it. :D I was thinking of getting a separate DVD drive for it and possibly an external HD to keep some of the important files on for storage. Sometimes, I have to do work with patient files (writing referral letters to other docs, for instance), and an external drive makes it easy to transfer without worrying about cloud and privacy issues.