I have been given an oldish Toshiba Satellite laptop that seems to work very well and will be great as a back up, the only thing is, as with most laptops it has a central "tracker pad" with left & right clicks either side of it, on all of my laptops if you want to select or open something you use the tracker pad to put the cursor over the item then tap the tracker pad, but on the Toshiba when I tap the pad nothing happens, you have to either left or right click.
Is there a way to alter it so i only have to tap the pad?
See if there are any drivers for the Toshiba (and tracker pad) on the Toshiba web site.
Many laptops need drivers to enable "laptop specific" hardware features on them.
In fact if someone reinstalled Windows on it, but never put on all the drivers on it, some other features may not work, so it is worth installing all the drivers.
My Toshiba satellite Pro was (and still is ) a load of rubbish, the keys fell off after 4 months but they refused to mend it under guarantee, having said that it still works 3 yrs later if very slow!
look for the trackpad symbol on the bottom left of the taskbar, you can usually right click it or double click to open, then check the settings and make sure "tap to click" is enabled, as it might just be switched off.
I also have Toshiba Satellite and it's a treat to use...running Win7 I go to Windows Control Panel and look for the mouse settings in the devices area..."seek and ye shall find ;-)
This will give you ..or at least it does on mine....the opportunity to set up the touch pad in various ways, including disabling/enabling the tap feature only, or adjusting the sensitivity of it..........
Disabling the pad and using a mouse is ok but not convenient at times when travelling say.