Again and again…
Never buy a windows laptop before checking it with LatencyMon.
I had an incredible disaster buying online.
I solved with a MacBookPro but I understand who doesn’t want to join the dark side of the force…
I’m glad you’ve solved your problems by having faith in this kind of force you speak of.
Maybe I’ll discover this faith the day I have problems like yours. 
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I vouch for the dark side… They’ve always given me awesome results…
PC’s sometimes gave me grief so I never went back
This! (Or buy from somewhere you are sure you can do a return without question)
Personally I gave up on a laptop and went the small rack mounted PC route.
Might be good to set up a thread where people post what laptops they find are working well and their LatencyMon results - I’m sure it would be a useful resource for many.
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Whatever you decide upon, a very simple and very importantly effective tactic for any laptop to prevent thermal throttling or OS power restrictions is to put as much physical air space as you can rig underneath it.
They all come with little feet that create the optimal airflow gap underneath on a flat surface (NEVER remove those, BTW). If you can somehow have holes in that hard (never soft) glass-flat surface the laptop is on, you will be automatically enhancing the airflow. Run with that principle for your rigging.
This advice comes from many years ago taking many remote tech support calls, probably hundreds of them in category of complaining of laptop fan ‘running like a jet engine’ before the laptop blue screened and shut down.
“Where are you using this laptop?”
“On my bed” - INVARIABLY.
This extreme should appear obvious but the principle can be easily leveraged for better airflow and it doesn’t take much effort. The good news is the reason new chips are always engineered into laptops before desktop versions is the absolute control over thermal situation locked into a laptop design. It knows how to keep itself cool—just don’t get in its way, and you can do this simple thing (ensure more airflow underneath) to help that enormously.
A little goes a long way, and normal operating temperature is quite warm, so even keeping it a couple of degrees cooler will help enormously.
You asked for thoughts there’s mine.
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I’m not sure brand really matters even though I do have my personal preferences. The issue with Windows on battery is Windows will reduce performance in order to preserve battery life. If you find your laptop isn’t performing up to par on battery, change your power settings where battery has the same settings as on power. You will find that your battery won’t last long. But that can be resolved by purchasing additional batteries, having them all charged, and changing batteries between sets.
Running on a generator, the battery will protect the laptop from surges. So, you wouldn’t have to actually rely on battery power.
I fell for the thinking that a gaming computer would be a great choice for real time computing. I was mistaken. And, don’t fall for the “MAX SPEED” claims. Look at the actual cycles on the CPU. And, there is a significant difference between i9 and i7 and i5. And be sure you kill all of Microsoft’s real time “defender” and “update” processes as well as any that might be provided by the hardware vendor.
Interesting, when I got my most recent computer, I wanted something comparable to Gen 12 i9 in the laptop I bought about 1 year before.
My research seemed to indicate that the Gen 13 i7 was (close but) slightly more powerful than my Gen12 i9. (And about 1/3 less expensive.)
More powerful in what context? I have applications where hard drive performance can make or break an application but processor speed is fairly inconsequential. With i9 over i7, you may be able to leave all of those background processes running due to the additional cores not affecting the ones used by your real time application. But if you only have one app running and it doesn’t use all of the cores, i7 with a faster cycle time would out perform the i9. Then there is IO performance on top of that. One laptop has many bottlenecks and which ones affect you are determined by the what applications you expect to run - simultaneously.
How do the Generations effect this? For example Gen 13i7 vs Gen 12i9?
Generation (AKA Gen) is Intels current way of notating “version”. A new version may or may not have performance improvements. Sometimes they just correct hardwire bugs in the processor. Anyone coding a BIOS needs to be able to determine the version (generation) in order to determine if they need to work around hardwire issues in the processor - Assembly code stuff.
I’ve had worse luck with Windows laptops. Due to the drivers in how they handle power and battery, they can perform poorly on latencymon even though they are “fast” on paper.
I recently bought a miniPC, the $400 Beelink SER5 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H. It handles running way more VSTs than the laptops I’ve tried. I purchased a small 14" USBC touchscreen that sends power and signal over one small cable. I’ve been very happy with this setup, it actually has as much CPU power as my desktop gaming PC. The downside is the fan can run loud under heavy load. On loud stages though you’d never hear it.
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