Lenovo laptops? Any other recommendations for basic laptop?

[silverfingersandtoes]

DS leaving home (again!) soon and seems to be planning to take the his laptop.
So I need one of my own. Just for browsing and a bit of Word and Excel, nothing major. Have been looking about and Lenovo seem to offer higher spec than anything else at my budget (about £300). I've had Lenovos before though and while they were sturdy and reliable as well as good value, they had a fault which I am beginning to think may be widespread - the cursor had a habit of hopping about and if you were not very careful - indeed, if you were very careful indeed and just unlucky - you were liable to find huge chunks of typing suddenly highlighted and deleted.
Has anyone else come across this?
TIA

[lazydog]

We have Lenovo, Dell and Toshiba laptops in our household and all are prone to the same behavior. You can usually reduce the likelihood of it happening in a setting that disables the touchpad while the laptop detects that you're typing, but one thing I can say for sure is that, in their default settings, my Dell Latitude seems far worse for it than the DSs' Lenovos!

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Have you had a look at Chromebooks?

[silverfingersandtoes]

That's really useful to know lazydog, it's good to know I was not imagining it / doing something particularly stupid to cause it.
Will have a look at Chromebooks now Itsall
Thanks, both

[RustyBear]

We have Lenovo think pads at school - they are coming up for 6 years old and out of the original 32 only one has failed completely, and one has had a new hard drive - they are very durable. After 6 years they are slowing down, but still usable.

I haven't seen the problem of cursor jumping, but then the model we have doesn't actually have a touchpad, just a little red button - newer models do have the touchpad.

[JumpingJackSprat]

I have a lenovo and it's fine - it will cope with what you want. I haven't noticed the cursor jumping.

[McFlurry]

DH has a Lenovo as his work laptop. He works for a large multinational IT company and travels a lot so his laptop has to be reliable and robust. I think it speaks volumes about them that they are this companies laptop of choice. They're not fancy but they do the job they're designed to and they do it well.

My Sony Vaio, on the other hand, is a big shiny, pretty disappointment. And it replaced an Acer that lasted a grand total of 5 weeks.

[DollyTwat]

PC world have some great Easter deals on, my son bought an HP laptop for £359 yesterday, i5 processor

I'd never buy a Dell ever again
My Lenovo died

[lazydog]

My advice is the exact inverse of DollyTwat's

My last 2 laptops have been Dells and both have been rock solid. My ancient dual core Vostro is still running fine, other than a dead battery, at 6 yrs old this month. My "new" laptop (an early i7 Latitude) is now ~3 yrs old and has given me no problems at all, either.

My boys really push their Lenovos by playing Minecraft constantly on them, when they only just meet the game's spec requirements, and yet they're both still going strong at 2.5yrs and 3yrs old.

I personally wouldn't touch a HP laptop with a barge-poll as we have definitely had a disproportionate number of customers with expensive 18 month old paperweights when their motherboards have failed. :( This was a huge problem a few years back, when overheating NVIDIA GPUs were desoldering themselves off the circuit board, but even now we still seem to see far more early catastrophic failures than I would expect from such a reputable brand.

[silverfingersandtoes]

Thanks everyone. I have almost decided on another Lenovo - trouble is that as usual I am finding it difficult to rein in my list of "would rather likes" and keep getting bumped up on the spec. Will just have to make a decision soon.
But I'd really, really like to know where I can find the setting mentioned by lazydog whereby it is possible to disable a laptop's touchpad while typing. I've lost so much work when it suddenly and arbitrarily highlights and deletes!

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Before you buy, consider a reconditioned laptop. You get a lot more bang for your buck that way...

[Chanatan]

To disable touchpad its
Control Panel>
Mouse>
Device settings and under that tab there is an option to disable.

I have just tried it on my Lenovo laptop and it worked,going to leave it like that now as I always use an external mouse.

[lazydog]

It depends on your touchpad's manufacturer and driver/utility software, but most commonly on Lenovos you get Synaptics touchpads I believe, so in that case you'd need to follow the instructions in this post, but do the reverse at the final stage (i.e. increasing "Palmcheck" instead of decreasing) :

forums.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad-Y-and-U-series-Laptops/Touchpad-gets-disabled-when-keys-are-pressed/ta-p/693887

I'm assuming that's what you'd want, rather than disabling the touchpad entirely? However, if you never use the touchpad and prefer an external mouse then obviously Chanatan's suggestion is an option.

[silverfingersandtoes]

Terrific.
My DS's laptop (a G580) doesn't have quite those settings, I find it goes Control Panel > Mouse > Elan > options > additional > palmtracking.
I've now put the slider to maximum and will try that out properly when I get the chance.
Very grateful for this and for the Lenovo community website too - I'll have a good browse of that, because I do think that with this glitch sorted out I'll go for a Lenovo again. They have so many good points.
I've thought about a reconditioned one, Chanatan, but it's one of the few things I would be very iffy about buying that way. I know they're supposed to have been given a good going over before being resold but I'd be afraid that nevertheless I'd be buying the previous buyer's problem iyswim. My techie skills are not up it. I'd rather lower my expectations and start with a clean slate. It's just a matter of reminding myself that I honestly do not need squillions of bytes of memory and so on, tempting though it is to spend just a little more, then just a little more......

[silverfingersandtoes]

Sorry, I meant itsall rather than Chanatan.