<p>you are not being unreasonable. And, for any urban campus, I would think a teather lock is of better value than dorm insurance. Sure, the insurance may/will replace the laptop, but: a) how fast; and, more importantly, b) what about the lost term paper due tomorrow? The $$ is only part of it. Students are often on short time frames and don't have the luxury to file a claim and wait for reimbursement.</p>
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<p>I've used at least 10 different notebook computers over the years. I've never had one that DIDN'T use the "tap the touchpad" standard for mouse clicking. It's possible you have one of the rare and valuable models that includes a utility to turn the feature off. Tap-the-touchpad is hugely inconvenient in airplanes when bouncing around. Turning the tap-the-touchpad off keeps you from selecting something you didn't want ever 15 seconds or so.</p>
<p>Terminology: "Laptop" is a term generally referring to older, usually AC-powered computers from the early 90s. Most of these weigh(ed) 8-20 pounds. Nearly all current portable computers are "notebooks," and typically weigh from 3-7 pounds. I believe these are commonly accepted definitions in the industry, although end-users are more casual. The term "notebook" originally came into use circa 1990 when "laptops" got down to the approximate size of a sheet of letter-sized paper.</p>
<p>With my macbook, I had to turn on the tap the touchpad feature. I never had any problems for the three hours I used it on an airplane. The odd places comment omitted the fact that I would not use my windows laptop without a full size mouse. The Mac OS is actually more annoying with a mouse, but works nicely with the touchpad.</p>
<p>My Windows laptop only let me click with buttons. Perhaps there was a way to turn that on, but I could never find the place in Control panel that let me do so. I could, however, turn the touchpad off entirely, which is what I did, because the number of mistaken selections and mouse movments were rather ridiculous. I get some with my mac, but they are much less frequent.</p>