Jana and I have been through a number of gaming laptops over the years. Just recently, Jana got a new MSI GT-80 TITAN SLI-253. Only 4 months later, it's already showing signs of a hardware issue. After the laptop has been off for a while, the NVIDIA driver will keep crashing and recovering. After it's "warmed up", a Windows reboot fixes it. Whatever the issue might be, if it's hardware, it is hard to fix in Costa Rica.

This seems to be as good a time as any to recap our experience with the various laptop brands so far:
  • Toshiba Qosmio #1 - purchased August 2009, for denis: Worked well for 2 years. At the end of its useful life, started freezing when graphics are in use. The rest of it continues to work even today, after abuse from our 2-year old son. Screen remains uncracked after he has walked on it.
  • Toshiba Qosmio #2 - purchased March 2010, for Jana: Worked well for 3.5 years, then began having occasional issues. We would buy this again, but it now seems to be hard to get.
  • Alienware #1 - purchased December 2011, for denis: Worked well for 1 year and 9 months; then motherboard died, apparently. Would no longer wake up.
  • MSI GT70 - purchased September 2013, for denis: Problems from day of delivery. Would only ever boot 50% of the time. Worked fine when it did boot.
  • Alienware #2 - purchased September 2013, for Jana: Worked well for 2 years, then screen cracked spontaneously from normal use. The rest of it works, and the screen could be replaced, but a repair is hard to arrange in Costa Rica.
  • Alienware #3 - purchased July 2014, for denis: Obtained to replace the MSI GT70 and its continuous booting problem. Shipped with non-functional battery, which had to be replaced at significant cost. Since then, it continues to work well at the time of this writing. (Here's to hoping!)
  • MSI GT80 - purchased September 2015, for Jana: Worked well for 4 months, then repeated problems with graphics began – graphics driver crashing and restarting.
Overall:
  • Toshiba was great, but hard to get now. We'd keep buying Qosmios if they were available.
  • Alienware has issues, but when it runs, it runs well. Time between issues could be better.
  • MSI seems prone to issues where the laptop kinda runs, but not dependably.