MSI Mosern are really good bang for the buck. I did some research about some budget laptops for a friend under 500$ and MSI won, not only by the specs but also from an extensibility standpoint (non-soldered RAM slots).
Pidgin IM client comes to my mind where there was a feature (not sure if only for Yahoo Messenger or also for other services) that when someone started to type, their chat window appeared for me. People were shocked about how I knew they were going to message me. Would be fun to have something like this on slack.