Recent generation notebooks with GOOD touchpad?

I obsessively read up on notebooks, 'droids, ipads, etc because I do work for people and because I have been in the biz a long time...
The last couple years have been downright awful for notebook quality. Bad touchpads that self-destruct typing, have uncontrollable cursor, plain stop working, etc, are on all sorts of devices from the humble to the exotic. your thousand-dollar notebook is rendered laughable by the flawed hardware, drivers, etc of the touchpad. infuriates owners and kills value of the "investment".

that said; randomly a few work. I had a dirt cheap Acer ES1 briefly and the touchpad function was as solid as my ancient Thinkpad. I could not FORCE it to err. very impressive. the rest of the machine... meh.

what GOOD notebooks do you know of that have rock-solid touchpad/typing performance?

 

ThinkPAD's.

Everything else is mickey mouse and/or has a fruity aftertaste.

 

Seconded. The best keyboards in laptops up to the 20 series. Good keyboards thereafter. Durable and reliable.

 

I've had a good experience with the keyboard & touchpad of my Thinkpad as well. However, beware that they did some experimenting on touchpads over the last couple years, so if you get a Thinkpad, I'd recommend one of the new P series, which re-introduces touchpad buttons where they should be. You can also check out the Dell and HP business & workstation systems for other decent options.

 

While business class Dell and HP systems are good and approach ThinkPAD pointing and keyboard performance with some models, they are still... Dell and HP's...

To me; they run too warm/hot. Too noisy and still cannot get the trackpoint (if included) to work like a ThinkPAD can. And TP's also seem to perform better (real world) even if the hardware is technically 'worse'.

Yeah; I'm a little biased. But many of my clients say the same after having owned all three. With Dell systems arguably being the worst of the bunch for 'heat, noise and worst typing/pointing experience' by far.

 

Can agree about the touchpad on my T450s, it's awesome.. It's the one laptop where I have not felt the need to ever use a mouse and this is even with doing repetitive stuff which a mouse would make easy to do because the touchpad is just so fast and responsive...

 

I have found the hard way over the last decade that it is always wrong to characterize notebooks on a Brand basis. There are a few good models here and there, but there are no good Brands.

So I heard one specific reco: T450.
Which other models, and if you know of one, light/cool, have verifiably excellent cursor performance?

I have an ancient thinkpad x120e and it is flawless point-wise. on 7, 8, 8.1, and now 10 [buggy as 10 is]. However, the X230 & 240 were pilloried by the Thinkpad loyalists - loathed I might say. Some of Dell's "best" have dreadful touchpad issues that have their community boards howling at the staff.

 

Is that due to touchpad being too large or placed at wrong position?

Can you give a list of laptops and touchpad models/makes that gave such problems to you?

 

I hate clickpad on my Thinkpad to the point I turned it off and use trackpoint alone. =\

 

I love that clickpad.. I almost miss it in my P771ZM and Samsung ultrabook..

 

I wish there were someway to log such errors but I know of none. And, I doubt that all of the errors are touchpad-inflicted - I have observed on a UX305FA zenbook [which is heavily criticized for these issues] cases where hitting the 'shift' key relocated the cursor, but one cannot reproduce it at will. it is random. I just happened to be staring at the right spot in a text file when that one happened. other "relocations" are clearly a case of palm-bump on the zenbook's irresponsibly huge surface area. it lacks the features of resizing the aperture [I think synaptics calls this the active zone ... something like that]. I have asked very good code people if a registry hack can reduce the aperture size and the answer is effectively "no".

I also wish there were a way to program one of the keyboard keys as a "toggle" for the touchpad. in older laptops some models had a physical switch for this. on some asus models a function-key-combo does it.

in older generations notebooks, these issues were not nearly so prominent. today, such maddening issue is the norm, and one must do a lot of homework to avoid it.