Asking for Advice buying a New Laptop

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Is there any particular brand I should be paying attention to or wary of? Is Dell still the Devil?

Dell has gotten better over the years for the prices are still terrible compared to Asus and MSI. Asus does give free 1 year Accidental Damage Warranty with most of their laptops but I did hear their customer service isn't as high as it should be.

Are there certain technical specifications that I could overlook that would hinder my ability to play games?

Don't get AMD. If you are on a budget which under $1200 for a laptop basically is, go with the a mechanical hard drive + a minimum of 8gb of ram. The reasons are that (depending on the laptop you buy), upgrading the Hard drive and Ram will not void the warranty and they are generally easy to do. So if you ever want an SSD + more ram in the future, you can always upgrade it but you can't upgrade the CPU/GPU in most cases. Also I suggest getting a minimum of a i7 + 970M but get a 1060 GPU (that will be around $1200) if you can. i7s are essentially desktop i5s and i5s are essentially desktop i3s

What benefits does Windows 10 have over other versions of Windows?

Direct X 12, better management of things like core utilization, snappy, UWP (It may not sound like a feature but if you want to play Xbox Anywhere games, it is a feature).

Is a Solid State Drive sufficently large after installing a few games?

Yes (depending on the size) but a GPU/CPU will affect games a lot more than a SSD will. I would buy a laptop with mechanical hard drive and upgrade it with a cheap SSD later than buying a laptop with a not so good CPU/GPU but a SSD. Cause you can't upgrade the CPU/GPU in a laptop in most cases.

What is the AMD vs Intel thing about?

AMD was great, they might be great in the future, currently, they aren't. Get intel and never look back.