I've been looking for a while and want a good laptop that has:-

1) 2.5" Mechanical HDD Drive Bay
2) DVDRW bay
3) mSATA bootable card slot - all the ones I come across seem to have really low capacity limitations
4) USB 3.0
5) Gigabit Ethernet

The above 5 are absolute musts, deal breaker if one of those is missing.

Ideally I'm looking for a Quad Core i7 based machine with battery life over 4 hours. Ram and Hard drive I can sort after purchase regardless what it comes with. Budget of up to £1,000.

I did like the look of the HP Envy, but those BIOSes have issues booting from the mSATA based card. There is no actual bootable option in the BIOS for the mSATA card as its just meant to be used with Intel RST