You might not need a new laptop. If your current machine has under 8GB of RAM and/or a mechanical hard disk, you can upgrade the RAM to 8GB or 16GB and upgrade the storage to an SSD. Both of these upgrades would represent a huge improvement from the older technologies.

Any of the costco gaming computers should be what you need/want. We have an MSI and its been really good.

I can do just enough on my laptop to be dangerous, but I don't really understand all the things I need to understand to make an informed decision about a new laptop

My old one (HP Pavilion about 3 years old) finally stinks to the point where I can't stand it. Somehow I've bogged it down to where the task manager says my disk use is 99% all of the time and
I can only do/fix things I can copy from youtube which hasn't solved the problem. In addition, my laptop crapped out shortly after I bought it and needed to fully reinstall windows and ever since then it's so slow that it's barely useable when there's an update loading.

I tend to keep a ton of photos store on my hard drive (even though I have other options).

Can someone tell me what to look for in terms of HDD/SSD/both/memory/other stuff so I can get a laptop that will survive me? I seem to be really hard on laptops....

To narrow it down, I was hoping to find something at costco (if possible), prefer a 15"+ screen and need a separate number pad for work, so I need a pretty chunky desktop replacement, but one I can't mess up like usual. Or maybe I just need advice on how to stop messing up all my laptops so they're almost full and unworkably slow??