Suggestions and questions about a VR laptop

[timdine]

I have a ROG GL752VW which I'd like to replace.  I did buy a rift a while ago which lives at a friends place because the 960M in my laptop suffers from the HDMI not found issues that I later learned while troubleshooting is typical of laptops trying to work with the rift.  The laptop works well for everything else I do with it, but I want some more VR in my life.  

 

Are there some good sub $2000CAD laptops out there that would be a good replacement.  I'd like to keep the full keyboard with number pad and more importantly a 17" screen, battery life is irrelevant.  I'm only ever unplugged if I'm moving from one location to another.  Is that not a reasonable budget and I should keep my laptop and pickup a desktop to go along with it?

 

Should I just buy a vive, all my issues go away with my current laptop.

 

How do I know that a given laptop won't have the internal design of the integrated and dedicated GPU that prevents the Rift from even attempting to work?  Aside from googling the specific model and seeing if someone has already made it work.  I'd be open to finding a second hand laptop if I knew I could avoid having the same problems.