PC Master Race

All of the comments below are relevant. Also being in Australia, school of distance is a thing. He only attends campus a few times a year for social activities and exams

That is AUD

I picked up a loq over black Friday sales last year for $800. Very happy with it. Linux mint. A separate account that runs steam when connected to the living room entertainment center.

Thanks. Yes, just at home for school work and a bit of gaming.

I think you made a good choice. I recently bought a Lenovo LOQ 17IRX10 at MSRP and I'm very happy with it. Before this I used a Lenovo Legion 5 17ITH6 for four years, and I only replaced it because Windows 10 is going EOL and I didn´t want to bother with switching to Linux on a dualboot.

I booted into Windows 11 a few times to check whether everything was working well, and that really cemented my decision to just wipe the whole thing and install Linux Mint. It was slow and cumbersome and I kept getting ads from either Microsoft or some preinstalled software. Switching to Linux didn´t go as smoothly as people sometimes suggested it would (but that's probably because I wanted to create a very specific setup), but now everything works very fast and it's just really nice and quiet.

~Okay so not sure why you posted this AFTER buying it and not asking before~

Because sometimes you can’t walk away saying “hold the deal for me, I need to do some research. “ These things happen in the moment and you need to make a decision on the spoy

The only problem in this is the microslop, otherwise it looks all fine to me.

Okay so not sure why you posted this AFTER buying it and not asking before but here are my 5 cents:

1500 AUD are roughly $1000. I think this price is overall ok for the specs that you got, however I'm not sure about the specs themselfs.

Due to current RAM and GPU prices I would have bought a laptop with no dedicated GPU. The integrated GPU is usually enough for watching videos, doing basic work and as long as you don't play any games (if you do so you shouldn't buy a laptop in the first place).

I'm not sure how it is in your case but most laptops I had have extendable/switchable RAM. I would have bought a laptop that has a single 8-16GB RAM stick pre-installed and has one extension slot so that you can upgrade once the RAM prices go down again.

Also get rid of this preinstalled Windows 11 Home that has likely a ton of bloatware preinstalled. I recommend a full clean Linux or Windows 10/11 Pro installation (btw here's a possibility how to activate it once installed).