I am typing on an Ideapd 110S. It was lame when I bought it secondhand, only 30GB of HD but once I fixed it up by adding a M.2 hard-drive it has been good. Are you going to be carrying it around much of the time or just keeping it at home? If the latter is the case, I prefer the older 15/6" laptops. HP are much better than Dell.
HP is gone very cheap and flimsy in the last few years. They are among the worst. Acer is better quality than HP now.
I just just got a Lenovo IdeaPad the other day. I despise the touchpad. Dell's touchpad was much more intuitive/accurate, but the processor in this machine is twice as powerful as my dell, and I suspect the cooling system is superior as well (though it probably doesn't matter as much since I'm using a lap-desk to provide excellent air circulation. Oh well... gifted the DELL to my parents). Other than the wack-job touchpad? The IdeaPad is built to impress. Since ThinkPad is the IdeaPad's more thoughtful and powerful cousin, I suspect you're instincts are sound. My other advice would be consider the processor, number of cores, etc. The memory doesn't matter as much in my estimation because unless you're saving a lot of files you won't use it. EDIT: also consider screen size* The 15.6 and 17 inch screens are mostly unnecessary and are a mechanism for exorbitant price increases. If you want to follow my lead, go with the 14".
Okay, since the OP doesn't seem to wanna respond, I'll at least throw a bone. When choosing a Thinkpad laptop, always keep in mind that only the T, X, and W-series of Thinkpads are the actual, bomb proof business machines. Others, like the E-series, are just ordinary consumer models with none of the benefits from the business class models. Thinkpad T, X and W-series models are built much sturdier and with better hardware at the time they were new. At this time, in the year 2020, don't go older than the series X230, or T430, or W530 or such. Anything older than that is on its way out. Preferably you'll wanna get something like the T440/T450/T460/T470-series, and make sure you get at least 8 Gb of RAM. 16 even better, if your budget can take it. Always buy second hand. You'll often get great deals with used machines, and if the machine was with a responsible owner previously, it'll barely show any wear. I own a Thinkpad from 2006 that still works like a champ, which cannot be said about anything that is made by Asus for example. Thinkpads are also quite Linux-friendly, if that's how you roll. Keep in mind that Thinkpads aren't really gaming rigs. Most models usually come with Intel integrated GFX chips, or at most with a low-to-mid range dedicated cards from NVidia or AMD. These are not very powerful for games, and certain NVidia cards have unacceptably high failure rates, so I personally would avoid those. The stock screens usually only offer the very modest 1366x768 screen resolution. Aftermarket HD res screens can be retrofitted, but it's a hassle. Further reading here: ThinkWiki
Back in March when COVID-19 ramped up, my boss called me and said stay home, we'll send you a laptop to work with. It was a Lenovo ThinkPad. So far so good. BTW, working from home, I've saved over $600. on transit fare, but that's another story.
THAT is good to know, as the first thing I do with everything I get, if possible, is shrink or eliminate entirely the windblows partition so I can install my preferreed OS. My last foray into these machines was when these little netbooks came out and I got an Acer Aspire One (zg5) and installed BSD & Slackware on it. The network card on it went to crap late last year, so I tried out one of the Asus netbooks I had which worked ok, but it seemed extremely sluggish, and it's severely limited with the newer versions of linux, too. Bummer. I'm gonna' have to relegate these to "toy" status and get me another laptop as well as a desktop machine. Honestly, though, I still miss my 32-bit ThinkCentre desktop more than all of them combined. I haven't seen any 64-bit machine that wasn't a habitual lockup machine no matter what OS is on it, and I've hated that more than I hated later versions of windows post-XP. Thanks for sharing your experience with us. I'm gonna' go check out the link you posted.
To put it simple " They are Garbage". I have seen several new ones go belly up in under 4 hour. Super cheaply made. If you do not take care you can bend the motherboard with every key stroke.
I'm a typist - I would rather type than even voice-to-text, so I like my laptop. And she's fast! the only problem being when the mouse buttons are transposed - I sometimes find myself right-clicking something I meant to left-click. There isn't really delineation of the two represented on the pad, and it's infuriating (well, at least a little frustrating anyway) when that happens.
Lies, lies, and more lies. You, sir, do not know what you're talking about. The actual BUSINESS model series (T, X, and W) of Thinkpads are not this shoddily built.
