I’m in pretty much the same boat. My past 2 laptops have been dell inspirons with a touchscreen. I use the touch screen for game programming to make sure touch events work. The one I got was $500, but probably should have gone a bit higher.

It has a i5 processor 16gb ram, 1 tb ssd. It does indeed run tf2, guild wars 2, and other not graphically intensive games. I’m satisfied and it does work well, but below are some of the negatives of my new laptop vs my old.

It’s missing key backlights, a fingerprint to unlock, and the bodyvis much more plastic and feels not as secure as my wife’s lenovo.

Be sure to check out pics for keyboard arrangement. My new laptop has a numberpad…which is nice, but the arrow keys got shrunk which is not nice for programming.

Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.

I picked money up from amazon.

I am also learning Japanese. I fine it hard to think of the sentence structure as different than English. In my mind I find myself daying the sentences the way Yoda from star wars does and it makes more sense.

Yoda I am–>Yoda desu

I’m a math teacher. I use my video game making knowledge from Godot to make little video games to review skills. Each takes a few weeks to make with game design, making all the art, programming, and making the worksheet.

Here is my Disco Dj-Demo if you were curious what I mean.

I think it’s fun, it’s not something I can really chat with others about.

I started doing diamond art. Here is a cheap set with honestly 100+ hours of content. AMAZON LINK

I would put on a TV show and sit at my desk and Diamond art for a few hours before bed. Each picture takes 10-15 hours in my experience. When I was done I would find someone to give the picture to.

So not only have you accomplished something and you can SEE THE PROGRESS, you don’t need a big shift in your life of watching youtube, and at the end you get to make some else happy by giving them a gift. And for a hobby it’s fairly inexpensive.