So I found a refurbished 2017 Thinkpad or a new Ideapad at comparable cost, both from Newegg. Anyone have an opinion on which will be better value?
Refurbs are almost always better value than new laptops. Unless you want to run the latest AAA games or bleeding-edge video editing software, hardware doesn't advance rapidly enough that you'll notice a difference between what they can do, and the older laptop will have depreciated in price.
That said, look at the specs before making a decision. My suspicion is that the refurb will have better specs (or perhaps comparable specs and better build quality) if it's comparably priced, but it's good to be sure.
They dont handle aggressive multi tasking very well.... if I have two GIS programs up and then fire up chrome to troubleshoot issues I'm having, things slow down to a crawl. And they're pretty heavy.
This really depends on
which model you have. Lenovo is a brand, and they produce a very wide variety of laptops. My previous laptop (an X1 Carbon) was extremely lightweight, and my current one (a T14 AMD) has an 8-core Ryzen that handles parallelism very well.