Thinking about a Netbook? Think about the trackpad first!

Posted by: Ragart on Dec 03 2008

How much space should there be between the trackpad and the keyboard? I think I may have mentioned this before, but the Wind is the first laptop I’ve ever purchased. It’s a great, tiny, and lightweight machine that’s able to do 99% of what I want it to do. I knew full well that there would be sacrifices to make for the size. Some web pages don’t quite fit on the small screen and some programs don’t either. I use Windows Live Writer to write for JAMM, but the “insert tags” button is actually cut off because the screen is so small. It’s these small quirks that I’ve learned to live with, but there’s still this one gigantic flaw in this small laptop: the trackpad.

I’ll just start out with this: I’ve never liked trackpads. I find them clunky. I find the little red nubs on those IBM laptops so much easier to use. And it’s not like you can accidentally click them or move them either.

What happens on a daily basis is this: I’ll be typing along and I’ll leave the cursor somewhere on the screen while a whole bunch of useless, mis-spelled words fill my screen (this is for my schoolwork, not for JAMM!). But then somewhere along the way something goes amiss and I’m suddenly typing my new paragraph RIGHT in the middle of my old one. What did I do?!

I, being the clumsy fool that I am (apparently), let my thumb or palm slip just enough so that it nudged the trackpad on the Wind. The Wind then interprets this as a mouse click and sets my text insertion point to wherever I last left my cursor. More often than not, this is right smack in the middle of another paragraph. I type pretty quickly, so I’ve often got a rather large block of text written out before I even realize that — ohhh craaaaap!

I’ve tried looking a little into the trackpad settings, but unfortunately I don’t think I can touch (hah) any of the pressure settings without messing with the registry. It’d be great if the trackpad required a bit of pressure by default to register “touches” as mouse clicks, but alas, this isn’t the case. Dust settling on the pad won’t set it off, but it’s not like I’m slamming my fists down on the netbook after every keystroke. I don’t hear *oink* when I type either, so I’m not exactly ham-fisting the netbook. But somehow the trackpad always finds an excuse to *click* and send me on this backwards road to my last paragraph when all I want to do is write out a review or an essay!

So for now I’ve got to suck it up and learn to make my hands hover above the trackpad of death, or buy a mobile mouse and shut the trackpad off permanently, because this little thing is really driving me up the wall. Again, as an inexperienced laptop owner, I’m just guessing here, but I’d wager if this were a more spacious laptop with more distance between the keyboard and trackpad my typing experience would be a lot less…jarring. So if you’re on the market for a netbook and you’ve never owned one before, this might be something to think about before your purchase. Coming down from a 13-17” laptop to a 10” netbook and its micro trackpad (situated 1cm from the spacebar) could be a deal-breaker for you.

(Ha! Look at that, I made it seem like this rant was written for readers and not just me expelling steam.)

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