Out of Pod Experience

I was going to suggest getting a convertible, but they are not smash resistant either. Maybe a Toughbook? EVE will run on most anything new these days.

Get a Thinkpad T540 if you plan or need to abuse this one too. They have good GPU and screen res options and can take a decent beating.

Otherwise a sturdy desktop PC chained or attached to your desk might be more appropriate.

Well the thinkpad is 1,000$. So either that or the Alienware? It's the same price, all I care about is performance and longevity. My previous few laptops weren't ridded of from smashing or broken screens/hinges. One was a fan failure, and another was some chip located away from the fans and heat sinks overheating, it was out of the way near the mouse pad and said AMD on it. Putting something cold on it prevented crashing, but why would something that gets hot not be put with a heatsink? It wasn't a very fast laptop either. I'm assuming maybe lower end video cards don't have heatsinks??

Not to mention an SSD will withstand a lot more abuse and will be 10X+ faster.

The 120GB mSATA SSD I put in my lappy was a little bigger than a large postage stamp, and I almost needed tweezers to install it. For less than $100 they are great snap-in replacements for spinning rust drives if the lappy has a mSATA slot, which all the Thinkpads have. If you know how to load & setup your own OS, don't buy these drives from DELL or Lenovo or you'll pay far too much. Same goes with memory upgrades, if you want more than 4GB buy it with 4, and get an aftermarket RAM kit.

When it comes to which one to get OP, compare RAM, CPU, GPU, warranty and screen resolution. Shoot for 3-year warranty if you can get it. DELL/Alienware and Lenovo are about on par with each other for their high-end stuff, so when faced with a choice for similar or identical kit, call both places and try to haggle, DELL is really hungry right now, they might make you a good deal.

I'd go with the HP. Actually... I have one and a Toshiba satellite as well, both a couple years old. I'm not a fan of Lenovo, and Alienware is ok enough. But for the HP there, edit out the hybrid drive. Let me make this clear. DON'T get a hybrid drive!! best of no worlds. Just get a pure SSD to whatever size your budget will allow, even a 256GB will work well enough on a Windows system (128GB under Linux). You can always use an external storage later, just don't clutter up the internal drive with useless junk.

Also, another thing to edit out if you can, is the OS. Have them send it to you as a blank system, no OS installed. Yeeears ago, you could find a laptop with really nice software bundles. Like I bought a gateway laptop long ago, it had the full version of M$ Office, a bunch of other good software like that as well, bundle worth about $1000 if bought off the shelf on a laptop I got for $1200, most of the bundle was useful for me and why I bought it. What do you get now? lol spyware, malware, useless bloatware crap you have no hope of removing without a technical cert on your side... and even then argh!!! heh. So, imo, I'd opt out of the wonderful pre-install and just go buy the OS install disk you want without all the added junk, probably Win 7 or 8 which ever you prefer there. They should still send you a drivers disk, but if not you can find a download someplace, Windows will still install and run the system w/o it until you can get the better drivers.

Both have age limiting issues. If you took your hhd and put it into storage for 10 or 20 years, any data on it may be lost when you go back to get the data. Unless you run a high volume web server, there is no real issue with ssd, and will most likely outlive any hhd and especially in a laptop.