In need of a professinal advice before spending anymore of my money...

[doron_1]

Im sorry in advance if its going to be long but i think the more information you have the better your advice would be.
il start from the top - in the last 6 months i started working online, mainly selling on ebay.
i used to do this from my home in israel , which there i have a stationary computer, a very powerful one which costs me around 3000$ a few years back , I7 3930K , 16GB low latency ram , OCZ REVODRIVE 3X2 SSD , ASUS RAMPAGE IV, love that system.
no matter how much i overload it, it never hiccup.
My wife and I , decided to move to thailand, i wasnt gonna take that computer with me so i started getting ready for mobility.
i bought a second hand Thinkpad T420 , basically because i loved its keyboard and Trackpoint, i upgraded it with a new SSD drive, and 16GB of ram, thinking it would be enough.
Now when i work, i multitask a lot, meaning i got a second screen plugged into it (by VGA) on every screen i got at least 20 tabs of google chrome and photoshop CC running in the background cause i often use it for editing some images.
What can i say, all of that, add facebook and youtube playing a song, and my thinkpad starts whining, playing youtube in the background caused me to really notice it, the songs actually freezing every now and then.
looking at Task manager i can see clearly that my cpu is peaking at 100% way too many times, and my memory also reaches about 80%.
my system was freshly installed about a month ago so it isnt a software issue.

Honestly , i think im going to give up here, i was thinking about upgrading the CPU but im not sure how much good can it really do...

Now what im asking from you guys is where to go from here, i want to upgrade to a new notebook.
Whats important to me are a few things :
1. Design- T420 maybe ugly, but its super durable, feels super strong and its keyboard is to die for, if i were to go for a P51 for example, can i somehow change the keyboard to the same one i have on my T420 ?
2. Size - Same same as T420 , can go a bit bigger, just needs to be as good as my T420 at least in regards to resulotion and ratio.
3. Trackpoint with physical buttons.
4. hardware'wise, needs to be an overkill, seriously, i want my pc to eat everything i throw at him and smile, no hiccups, no heating up, im not using it for gaming so i dont know about the display card, dont need anything fancy, just support of 2-3 monitors at the same times(including the laptop's main screen of course)
i was thinking -
CPU - I7
MEMORY -32GB or even more.
SSD- 120GB would be enough for me , most my stuff are on cloud anyway

im open to suggestions and your recommendations and thank you in advance.

 

[Saga Lout]

Every tab you open in Chrome kickstarts another instance of the entire programme opening up. Try Firefox - it knows how to offer tabbed browsing the proper way.

If you don't believe me, take a look at Task Manager when you have several live tabs in Chrome.

 

[doron_1]

hmm, i used to role with firefox, after a while it gets really slow and laggy, i gave up on it long ago, moreover, all my information, profiles and extensions are in google chrome, changing isnt an option.

 

[Saga Lout]

And Chrome will continue to slow you down. Maybe increasing your RAM would help.

 

[Karadjgne]

Might take a peek at Lenovo site. IBM is the only brand I know of that uses the TrackPoint, which is now Lenovo. I'm guessing something along the lines of a P70 would do right by you.

 

[hang-the-9]

Lenovo W520, you can get it with a quad core i7 and 4 RAM bays, has same keyboard as the T420, just with a stronger CPU. You can re-use your T420 RAM in it and the SSD.

 

[GreyCatz]

Could you tell us a bit more about your particular T420?

I'm surprised that you could install 16GBs of RAM because according to Lenovo RAM capacity in the T420 is capped at 8GBs.

What CPU are you using? The T420 was commercially available with a dual-core Core i3, i5 or i7, typically 2520M. Realistically, I think a quad-core i7-2720QM with 6MB of L3 cache running at 2.2GHz (max 3.3GHz) is as far as you can hope to go with the T420 (83 per cent upgrade chance). In theory, the mainboard will support a quad-core i7-2960XM, but the upgrade chance is significantly lower, at 33 per cent.

What OS are you running? And what music app do you use?

 

[Karadjgne]

Depends on the model. With pre-builts and laptops, from what I've seen, if the model had a variety of possible cpus available, like the i7-2720QM, then the bios would allow the cpu. If the i7 dual was top line, chances of an i7Q working will be slim.