My suggestion is a little different and comes with almost 20 years of IT experience with Laptops: Dont be fooled by huge specifications....go for quality proven brands every time. You can also pretty much ignore 90% of internet reviews because 9 times out of 10 they are by people or companies reviewing out of the box systems - the truth is, 12 months....and half a dozen OS updates later the laptop will be running very differently. Also people hardly ever post cooments online when they are happy, so a succesfull brand will always have more negative comments from owners.

First you need to decide what you want to do with your laptop because that will make a difference on certain hardware choices.

If you are going to be working with huge image files with multiple layers (and I mean HUGE as in billboard sized), video rendering or 3d gaming then you need a system with a suitable graphics chip - the pay off is battery life. if you are using it for internet, emails and word processing you do not need high end graphics - the benefit will be longer battery life. Or, if you want both (like me) I have a laptop with OS switchable graphics.

CPU power and RAM are similar to the above but with the following: If you are a person that likes tons of tabs and processes running at the same time the CPU and RAM need to be faster and larger, if your not into installing a lot of third party stuff and don't multitask much then you dont need to worry about having the fastest and the biggest!

For me and depending on your budget, it is better to get a more expensive lower spec computer, (for example a base model I3/I5 Thinkpad) than a fully loaded low cost I7 unit from a company that produces high volume, high spec, low cost units.