mic333,
Here is what I would suggest you do.
1. Get this ASUS X750JB-DB71.laptop for $909. I do not like the low resolution of the screen (they do offer this series with a full HD screen), but you have a severe $ restriction.
2. Buy two hard disk drives like this 500 GB 7200 RPM drives for $60 each and install the OS and applications on the first drive and use your second 500 GB 7200 rpm one for the projects. The laptop has two internal hard drives. Of course the ideal configuration would be for SSD's but your budget does not allow that. Get an external USB 3 2.5 disk enclosure for the 2 x 1 TB 5400 rpm drives and use them for backup/archiving.
3. Upgrade the memory to 16 GB by installing a 8 GB SO-DIMM in the empty memory slot for about $80. (I beleive that they install one 8 GB module)
So for about $1100 you have a usable laptop with a great Intel fourth generation mobile i7-4700HQ 4-core hyperthreaded mobile processor with an nVidia GT 740M with 384 CUDA cores but sadly the 2GB of video RAM is DDR3 memory and 16 GB of RAM, Incidently, you can acquire a disk drive carrier for the interchangable optical drive for a third disk drive.
For about $250 more than the $909 base ($1150) unit you can get a full HD screen in a refurbished unit. It is a unit that has a better GPU, the GTX 765m. The GTX 765m It has twice as many cores and the video memory is GDDR5 with much,much better memory bandwidth. It has a single 1 TB drive installed currently from Newegg. The BB in the G750JW-BBI7N05 indicates it was original configured for Best Buy where you can get a brand new unit for $1250 plus sales tax.
You just convinced me that I should have one of these and subsequent searching I just found the HD screen refurbished unit at BlinQ.com for $937.89. I may order from Newegg and use their Iron Egg℠ Price Guarantee program
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