Good Info being shared here, and from what I experienced with the Builtin Graphics Card on my HP Envy, with 16 Gigs of Ram, Samsung SSD running Samsung Magician etc. I would never buy another Shared Graphics Card on Laptop........Mine is a slouch when considering I have 1 Tera SSD and fast Ram maxed out on this laptop......It was a big mistake buying my Laptop with Shared GPU, it can't handle the Frame Rates, and too me, that hurts in this particular game when Rendering look ahead Objects whether it be Trains, Rolling Stock Buildings and even Texture..........
My next Laptop will probably be Alien or one of the others mentioned here. Absolutely understand the CD Drive thing, and old school thing, unfortunately it looks like we are getting pushed out with internal DVD units for both slimness of design and other things.
One other thing I would like to mention if I may, they make good size USB memory sticks, up to 256 Gig I believe, and that can be convenient for some of your Trainz backups.......I use Carbonite for my computers (backup off-site) and spare External Drive for all my T:ANE Files, which looks like I am running about 300Gigs for now...........
For the express purpose of having a 3 way backup, this year and last, I noticed a number of Trainzers with Hard Drive and Computer crashes.
One of the poor fellows had a Route that was 2-3 years in the making if I recall correctly, and he lost all his hard work..........In my case, I have experienced Hard Drive Crashes in the late 80's fortunately I only lost some Word Documents which I had some print outs and had to manually remake them,, what a pain.......Back then we had Floppy Disks 1.2 meg and smaller size 760k or something, been too long.......The round graphite ones, and the Plastic Case ones you fit in your shirt pocket with my 6 Ink Pins.............Yes I am a geek and proud of it.......LOL
Wish you good luck with your computer.............And you have some mighty good friends here helping you too I see.