9 ms·

The XPS13 appears to have a junk trackpad (no buttons, no middle button) and a messed up keyboard (I don't always use the arrows but when I do, those tiny ones

The XPS13 appears to have a junk trackpad (no buttons, no middle button) and a messed up keyboard (I don't always use the arrows but when I do, those tiny ones suck.) And no trackpoint? Despite better other specs, poor basic human interaction devices are a showstopper. ThinkPads are the only ones I've seen with fairly good keyboards (even after Lenovo's "redesign"). Dell does have on call service, and in some countries it's better than Lenovo by far. I've had Dell send a guy into a village up a mountain in a 3rd world country, next day (!) whereas I couldn't even figure out how to make a claim with Lenovo in that country (and friends that work for the relevant company there confirm there is no inventory).

wazoox 11y ago
I haven't seen a trackpad with buttons for 8 years (Apple, Dell, Asus... ditched them between 2008 and 2012). People have chosen a long time ago, and physical trackpad buttons are a curiosity nowadays.
- dingo_bat 11y ago
  All pro style laptops (HP Elitebook/Lenovo Thinkpad/Dell Precision) have trackpad buttons and extra buttons for the nipple controller too. I must say I love having proper buttons and have used such laptops exclusively. Although I do have a Macbook air without the buttons. You're right that consumer laptops have done away with buttons nowadays.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Lenovo tried ditching them on the ?40 line (T440 X240 etc). It was a disaster. Not just because it was terrible, but lacking buttons just sucks. (Though I am referring to the TrackPoint buttons (on top), which work very nicely even with the trackpad.) Maybe folks using things like Macbooks just don't notice issues like heat and poor ergonomics? Though that's not a very satisfying idea.
treffer 11y ago
The touchpad works well with multi-tap and can handle single/double/tripple tab. Feel free to map that to the middle mouse if needed. The keyboard is actually quite good once you get used to it. I used to need a keyboard replacement every 12-18 months on my lenovo (yes, you read that correctly). The Dell one has now survived 12 months, so I'd say the build quality is quite good, perhaps even better than the lenovo one (might also be due to design - nothing gets stuck under the keys, which helps a lot). Dell has even send me replacement parts in the past to repair stuff on my own. [EDIT] type.
- beeboop 11y ago
  edit: I realize after posting this it might not be relevant since you may be discussing the trackpad as used with Ubuntu. As of 1 month ago, when I bought and then returned an XPS 15 due to the trackpad, there was no option for middle clicking and no option for navigating forward/back. There are also horrific sensitivity issues with the trackpad that is extremely well documented in user complaints online - the cursor doesn't start moving until your finger moves about a millimeter on the trackpad, resulting in it "jumping" when you are moving very small distances with high cursor speed. These are all software issues - I installed Synaptics and it fixed these problems, but introduced others. I spent over 20 hours testing and researching and messing with the registry to have a trackpad that works the same as most any other laptop with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. I obviously didn't succeed, which is why I returned it. To clarify, this is really a Windows 10 issue, and to some extent an Synaptics driver issue (even though it isn't officially supported by Dell).
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    For what it's worth, I had a bad time with the trackpad with a default 14.04 install. Switching to 14.10 fixed it, presumably due to the inclusion of newer drivers.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Synaptics is terrible (at least from using them on ThinkPads for years). It loses settings, frequently. When using the trackpad, it uses several percent of CPU. That's idiotic.
ThePhysicist 11y ago
That might be true but even now I don't use the trackpad so it wasn't an important factor for me. With my Thinkpad I either use a mouse or the little red dot, which is a bit more fatiguing for the hands though. Thanks for sharing your service experience, as I need my laptop for work everyday this is an important point for me.
alkonaut 11y ago
There may exist some non-crap trackpad with buttons but I have never used one. The buttonless trackpad on my current Dell precision is just as good as the one on my 2011 MBP. I'd actively avoid a laptop if the trackpad had buttons now I think.
- Tiksi 11y ago
  I haven't seen a non-crap touchpad that didn't have buttons, likely because my definition of crap is different than yours and includes massive surfaces that feel awful and get in the way of using the keyboard, and hoping the proper amount of fingers hit the touchpad within the correct window of time (and weren't too close together and counted as a single finger) to perform the click I meant to.
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    I don't think it's the fact that it's buttonless that make my new non-button pad non-crap, I think it's the fact that they aimed for the quality (and part cost) of the MBP trackpad that makes it also achieve that kind of quality feel.
    - Tiksi 11y ago
      I'm one of those strange people that finds mac touchpads maddeningly annoying. I used to carry a mouse with me when I had a macbook for work. So non-crap is the opposite direction from that for me. But hey, to each their own. That's why it's nice to have the choice of a wide range of machines, everyone gets what they want.
  - curt15 11y ago
    With proper palm rejection the trackpad should not interfere with the keyboard. From personal experience, Macbooks trackpads rarely register spurious touches while typing.
  - adrusi 11y ago
    I've used a number of computers with apple-style the-whole-trackpad-is-the-button systems. The quality varies considerably, from completely unusable to my favorite way of controlling the cursor (better than a mouse, for casual purposes like web browsing). Mostly it's a problem with the software. I currently use a Thinkpad T440p, which is of the generation of thinkpads universally reviled for their "shitty" trackpad and lack of discrete trackpoint buttons. I can't comment on the trackpoint since I have no interest in using it, but the trackpad is truly unusable on Windows. It seems that most non-apple laptop manufacturers that have adopted this style of trackpad have done it for aesthetic purposes, to mimic Apple, and to give users more space to move their fingers over. Their trackpad designs are essentially what you would have if the surfaces of the physical trackpad buttons were also touch sensitive on a tradition trackpad design: the bottom-right corner of the trackpad is a right-click area. I hate to evangelize Apple for fear of being associated with people who evangelize Apple, but Apple understands interface design well enough to realize that that's a terrible way to design a trackpad. The point of Apple's design is to unite tap-to-click mode of traditional trackpads with the button-activated mode. The tap-to-click mode has always been simpler because you don't have to keep your thumb on the button all the time. This gives your hands more freedom; you only have to maintain one point of contact with the trackpad, and you can pivot around that point however you want, rather than being anchored by a second point. This might help defend against RSI, and also makes it faster to transition between controlling the cursor and typing. But the problem with tap-to-click has always been sensitivity. Typing on a laptop with a tap-to-click trackpad is a horrible experience because your wrist accidentally contacts the trackpad and activates a click event, moving the carat or focusing on a different field and suddenly your keystrokes are being sent to the wrong place. Apple's trackpads solve the problem by changing tap-to-click to push-down-to-click. When they introduced this on their laptops it was fantastic, it was what a trackpad experience should have always been like. As someone who's used Apple's "Magic Trackpad", which is huge, I can say there's almost no value in a larger trackpad surface, which is what other manufacturers are going for. I don't move my wrist when using the trackpad, my range of mobility is limited to the range of my knuckles. If I want to move the cursor a long distance, I'll move my finger quickly and take advantage of cursor accelleration. For moving short distances, it's intuitive that you wouldn't need any range of motion. So the "soft buttons" that they put on "clickpads" are terrible. They have all the disadvantages of traditional trackpads in that they anchor your hand position, but there's no tactile indication of where the button is, so sometimes when you want to right click, you accidentally miss the button and left click. Worse, they make the entire rest of the trackpad surface a left click (like in Apple's design), so it's tempting to use it like an Apple clickpad, but if you do that, sometimes your finger will end up over the right click button and it will do the wrong thing. If you have a shitty clickpad and you use linux, `synclient ClickPad=0` will fix it and make it work like and Apple clickpad. You can also set ClickPad=0 in your Xorg.conf to persist it.
curt15 11y ago
The XPS 13's trackpad does conform to the Microsoft Precision touchpad specification, and handles multitouch gestures quite smoothly in Windows. Any failings of the trackpad in Linux can't be blamed on the hardware.
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  > The XPS 13's trackpad does conform to the Microsoft... Any failings of the trackpad in Linux can't be blamed on the hardware. err, pardon? The hardware is designed for another operating system and its failure in Linux can't be blamed on that hardware?! I have a Dell Rugged Extreme 12, which is the XPS in wolves' clothing... it's fantastic. But in both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, either the trackpad and the touch sceen would randomly stopped working ... often under suspend. But the trackpad works and has always worked perfectly in Ubuntu Linux. Ironic.
  - curt15 11y ago
    The main bottleneck for PC touchpads has always been the poor quality of the hardware (for example, using low-bandwidth PS2 connections). The Microsoft specification is a hardware specification (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn467317(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...). All the hardware provides is a stream of raw input data. It's up to the OS to process that data intelligently.
    - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
      "Hardware specification" sounds like it's designing the shape and size of an ATX motherboard. That set of documents appears to be largely focused on the HID protocol for data transfer between a Microsoft-certified touchpad and the driver, not a specification for the hardware design per se. With that said, open, freely licensed, and non-patent-encumbered protocols are vitally important and it's awesome that Microsoft has stepped up and shown leadership.. if that's what that is. Microsoft has been doing more and more impressive things to work with the open-source community since Ballmer, and that'd be great if that's what it is. Care to comment on if that's a: 1) freely licensed or open-source specification 2) patent-encumbered?
toyg 11y ago
Sorry dude, you're stuck in 2001. Physical trackpad buttons break, and break often -- which is why they're disappearing. MacBook trackpads are widely recognized as superior, and they are buttonless. The "clit" is also a history footnote at this point, it never got mainstream adoption. If you like Thinkpads that's fine, but don't try to pass your judgement as something universal because it's clearly coming from a very small minority.
- joesmo 11y ago
  The Macbook, no-button trackpads also break constantly. Every Macbook I've owned over a few months has had a broken trackpad including Retinas and Airs. On my current Retina, it's broken twice and after the initial replacement during warranty, Apple does not give you any additional warranty on its parts or labor for repairs (beyond 30 days). The repair cost for a trackpad on a Retina or Air: $320 + tax. Ironically, the only trackpads I've worked with that haven't broken are ones with separate physical buttons like the old Macbook Pro ones and many crappy trackpads from companies like Acer that are unusable to begin with. I suspect this is why Apple went with a no moving parts design for their latest trackpads: they simply cannot build a proper trackpad with moving parts that won't break after a few months of even light use.
  - jsjohnst 11y ago
    You realize it's a laptop, not a punching bag, right? Out of the hundreds of Apple laptops I or coworkers/friends have owned, I've only seen a few with broken trackpads, and all were five or more years old and most (all?) had something dropped on it.
    - joesmo 11y ago
      Without your great insight, I never would have realized my laptop is a laptop and not a punching bag. Thanks for making everything so clear! I now understand why my punching bag doesn't compile. Also, your anecdotal evidence is meaningless and doesn't disprove my experience despite your rude attempts to do so.
rayiner 11y ago
Trackpad buttons are a crutch for trackpads that can't reject small cursor movements while clicking the tracking surface.
- Aeolos 11y ago
  Indeed, I hate trackpad buttons with a passion. Waste of space, when you could have fit a larger trackpad in the same area.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Interesting. I hear people like Apple's laptops, yet I despise the pad. Requires too much force to click (and how do you get middle/right without pressing down?). OTOH those machines run super hot and have poor keyboards and folks still like them. Perhaps some people aren't bothered by things like that?
  - rayiner 11y ago
    On an apple laptop I use my middle and ring fingers for scrolling, my index or middle finger for pointing, and my thumb for clicking. I click with my thumb while holding the pad with my middle and ring finger for right-click. You gotta click near the bottom because they're hinged across the top. The inadvertent movement rejection is so good you can just leave your four fingers on the pad without thinking about switching between them.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - rcthompson 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure the force required to click can be adjusted in the latest models.
CalRobert 11y ago
I own an XPS 13 (the 9333, the first 1920x1080 one). I have very much enjoyed it. The trackpad, to me, has been excellent, and the keyboard a delight, even with the tiny arrows, which I use constantly since they work in coordination with Fn to be Home, End, and Page up and down. There is no physical middle button, but I switched to the XPS 13 from an MBP so I am used to this arrangement. The only complaint I have is the small coil whine noticeable in quiet settings, which I believe they've fixed, the lack of anything like magsafe on the power cord, which is a patent issue, and the soldered-on ram, which is understandable given the form factor, but frustrating. I DO like that the mSATA storage is upgradable.
CydeWeys 11y ago
The XPS arrow keys don't look any different from the ones on a Macbook Pro, and those are fine. I end up using the touchpad for many of the things I used to use the arrow keys for anyway.

wazoox 11y ago

I haven't seen a trackpad with buttons for 8 years (Apple, Dell, Asus... ditched them between 2008 and 2012). People have chosen a long time ago, and physical trackpad buttons are a curiosity nowadays.

dingo_bat 11y ago
All pro style laptops (HP Elitebook/Lenovo Thinkpad/Dell Precision) have trackpad buttons and extra buttons for the nipple controller too. I must say I love having proper buttons and have used such laptops exclusively. Although I do have a Macbook air without the buttons. You're right that consumer laptops have done away with buttons nowadays.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Lenovo tried ditching them on the ?40 line (T440 X240 etc). It was a disaster. Not just because it was terrible, but lacking buttons just sucks. (Though I am referring to the TrackPoint buttons (on top), which work very nicely even with the trackpad.) Maybe folks using things like Macbooks just don't notice issues like heat and poor ergonomics? Though that's not a very satisfying idea.

treffer 11y ago

The touchpad works well with multi-tap and can handle single/double/tripple tab. Feel free to map that to the middle mouse if needed. The keyboard is actually quite good once you get used to it. I used to need a keyboard replacement every 12-18 months on my lenovo (yes, you read that correctly). The Dell one has now survived 12 months, so I'd say the build quality is quite good, perhaps even better than the lenovo one (might also be due to design - nothing gets stuck under the keys, which helps a lot). Dell has even send me replacement parts in the past to repair stuff on my own. [EDIT] type.

beeboop 11y ago
edit: I realize after posting this it might not be relevant since you may be discussing the trackpad as used with Ubuntu. As of 1 month ago, when I bought and then returned an XPS 15 due to the trackpad, there was no option for middle clicking and no option for navigating forward/back. There are also horrific sensitivity issues with the trackpad that is extremely well documented in user complaints online - the cursor doesn't start moving until your finger moves about a millimeter on the trackpad, resulting in it "jumping" when you are moving very small distances with high cursor speed. These are all software issues - I installed Synaptics and it fixed these problems, but introduced others. I spent over 20 hours testing and researching and messing with the registry to have a trackpad that works the same as most any other laptop with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. I obviously didn't succeed, which is why I returned it. To clarify, this is really a Windows 10 issue, and to some extent an Synaptics driver issue (even though it isn't officially supported by Dell).
- CalRobert 11y ago
  For what it's worth, I had a bad time with the trackpad with a default 14.04 install. Switching to 14.10 fixed it, presumably due to the inclusion of newer drivers.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Synaptics is terrible (at least from using them on ThinkPads for years). It loses settings, frequently. When using the trackpad, it uses several percent of CPU. That's idiotic.

ThePhysicist 11y ago

That might be true but even now I don't use the trackpad so it wasn't an important factor for me. With my Thinkpad I either use a mouse or the little red dot, which is a bit more fatiguing for the hands though. Thanks for sharing your service experience, as I need my laptop for work everyday this is an important point for me.

alkonaut 11y ago

There may exist some non-crap trackpad with buttons but I have never used one. The buttonless trackpad on my current Dell precision is just as good as the one on my 2011 MBP. I'd actively avoid a laptop if the trackpad had buttons now I think.

Tiksi 11y ago
I haven't seen a non-crap touchpad that didn't have buttons, likely because my definition of crap is different than yours and includes massive surfaces that feel awful and get in the way of using the keyboard, and hoping the proper amount of fingers hit the touchpad within the correct window of time (and weren't too close together and counted as a single finger) to perform the click I meant to.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  I don't think it's the fact that it's buttonless that make my new non-button pad non-crap, I think it's the fact that they aimed for the quality (and part cost) of the MBP trackpad that makes it also achieve that kind of quality feel.
  - Tiksi 11y ago
    I'm one of those strange people that finds mac touchpads maddeningly annoying. I used to carry a mouse with me when I had a macbook for work. So non-crap is the opposite direction from that for me. But hey, to each their own. That's why it's nice to have the choice of a wide range of machines, everyone gets what they want.
- curt15 11y ago
  With proper palm rejection the trackpad should not interfere with the keyboard. From personal experience, Macbooks trackpads rarely register spurious touches while typing.
- adrusi 11y ago
  I've used a number of computers with apple-style the-whole-trackpad-is-the-button systems. The quality varies considerably, from completely unusable to my favorite way of controlling the cursor (better than a mouse, for casual purposes like web browsing). Mostly it's a problem with the software. I currently use a Thinkpad T440p, which is of the generation of thinkpads universally reviled for their "shitty" trackpad and lack of discrete trackpoint buttons. I can't comment on the trackpoint since I have no interest in using it, but the trackpad is truly unusable on Windows. It seems that most non-apple laptop manufacturers that have adopted this style of trackpad have done it for aesthetic purposes, to mimic Apple, and to give users more space to move their fingers over. Their trackpad designs are essentially what you would have if the surfaces of the physical trackpad buttons were also touch sensitive on a tradition trackpad design: the bottom-right corner of the trackpad is a right-click area. I hate to evangelize Apple for fear of being associated with people who evangelize Apple, but Apple understands interface design well enough to realize that that's a terrible way to design a trackpad. The point of Apple's design is to unite tap-to-click mode of traditional trackpads with the button-activated mode. The tap-to-click mode has always been simpler because you don't have to keep your thumb on the button all the time. This gives your hands more freedom; you only have to maintain one point of contact with the trackpad, and you can pivot around that point however you want, rather than being anchored by a second point. This might help defend against RSI, and also makes it faster to transition between controlling the cursor and typing. But the problem with tap-to-click has always been sensitivity. Typing on a laptop with a tap-to-click trackpad is a horrible experience because your wrist accidentally contacts the trackpad and activates a click event, moving the carat or focusing on a different field and suddenly your keystrokes are being sent to the wrong place. Apple's trackpads solve the problem by changing tap-to-click to push-down-to-click. When they introduced this on their laptops it was fantastic, it was what a trackpad experience should have always been like. As someone who's used Apple's "Magic Trackpad", which is huge, I can say there's almost no value in a larger trackpad surface, which is what other manufacturers are going for. I don't move my wrist when using the trackpad, my range of mobility is limited to the range of my knuckles. If I want to move the cursor a long distance, I'll move my finger quickly and take advantage of cursor accelleration. For moving short distances, it's intuitive that you wouldn't need any range of motion. So the "soft buttons" that they put on "clickpads" are terrible. They have all the disadvantages of traditional trackpads in that they anchor your hand position, but there's no tactile indication of where the button is, so sometimes when you want to right click, you accidentally miss the button and left click. Worse, they make the entire rest of the trackpad surface a left click (like in Apple's design), so it's tempting to use it like an Apple clickpad, but if you do that, sometimes your finger will end up over the right click button and it will do the wrong thing. If you have a shitty clickpad and you use linux, `synclient ClickPad=0` will fix it and make it work like and Apple clickpad. You can also set ClickPad=0 in your Xorg.conf to persist it.

curt15 11y ago

The XPS 13's trackpad does conform to the Microsoft Precision touchpad specification, and handles multitouch gestures quite smoothly in Windows. Any failings of the trackpad in Linux can't be blamed on the hardware.

jamiesonbecker 11y ago
> The XPS 13's trackpad does conform to the Microsoft... Any failings of the trackpad in Linux can't be blamed on the hardware. err, pardon? The hardware is designed for another operating system and its failure in Linux can't be blamed on that hardware?! I have a Dell Rugged Extreme 12, which is the XPS in wolves' clothing... it's fantastic. But in both Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, either the trackpad and the touch sceen would randomly stopped working ... often under suspend. But the trackpad works and has always worked perfectly in Ubuntu Linux. Ironic.
- curt15 11y ago
  The main bottleneck for PC touchpads has always been the poor quality of the hardware (for example, using low-bandwidth PS2 connections). The Microsoft specification is a hardware specification (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn467317(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...). All the hardware provides is a stream of raw input data. It's up to the OS to process that data intelligently.
  - jamiesonbecker 11y ago
    "Hardware specification" sounds like it's designing the shape and size of an ATX motherboard. That set of documents appears to be largely focused on the HID protocol for data transfer between a Microsoft-certified touchpad and the driver, not a specification for the hardware design per se. With that said, open, freely licensed, and non-patent-encumbered protocols are vitally important and it's awesome that Microsoft has stepped up and shown leadership.. if that's what that is. Microsoft has been doing more and more impressive things to work with the open-source community since Ballmer, and that'd be great if that's what it is. Care to comment on if that's a: 1) freely licensed or open-source specification 2) patent-encumbered?

toyg 11y ago

Sorry dude, you're stuck in 2001. Physical trackpad buttons break, and break often -- which is why they're disappearing. MacBook trackpads are widely recognized as superior, and they are buttonless. The "clit" is also a history footnote at this point, it never got mainstream adoption. If you like Thinkpads that's fine, but don't try to pass your judgement as something universal because it's clearly coming from a very small minority.

joesmo 11y ago
The Macbook, no-button trackpads also break constantly. Every Macbook I've owned over a few months has had a broken trackpad including Retinas and Airs. On my current Retina, it's broken twice and after the initial replacement during warranty, Apple does not give you any additional warranty on its parts or labor for repairs (beyond 30 days). The repair cost for a trackpad on a Retina or Air: $320 + tax. Ironically, the only trackpads I've worked with that haven't broken are ones with separate physical buttons like the old Macbook Pro ones and many crappy trackpads from companies like Acer that are unusable to begin with. I suspect this is why Apple went with a no moving parts design for their latest trackpads: they simply cannot build a proper trackpad with moving parts that won't break after a few months of even light use.
- jsjohnst 11y ago
  You realize it's a laptop, not a punching bag, right? Out of the hundreds of Apple laptops I or coworkers/friends have owned, I've only seen a few with broken trackpads, and all were five or more years old and most (all?) had something dropped on it.
  - joesmo 11y ago
    Without your great insight, I never would have realized my laptop is a laptop and not a punching bag. Thanks for making everything so clear! I now understand why my punching bag doesn't compile. Also, your anecdotal evidence is meaningless and doesn't disprove my experience despite your rude attempts to do so.

rayiner 11y ago

Trackpad buttons are a crutch for trackpads that can't reject small cursor movements while clicking the tracking surface.

Aeolos 11y ago
Indeed, I hate trackpad buttons with a passion. Waste of space, when you could have fit a larger trackpad in the same area.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Interesting. I hear people like Apple's laptops, yet I despise the pad. Requires too much force to click (and how do you get middle/right without pressing down?). OTOH those machines run super hot and have poor keyboards and folks still like them. Perhaps some people aren't bothered by things like that?
- rayiner 11y ago
  On an apple laptop I use my middle and ring fingers for scrolling, my index or middle finger for pointing, and my thumb for clicking. I click with my thumb while holding the pad with my middle and ring finger for right-click. You gotta click near the bottom because they're hinged across the top. The inadvertent movement rejection is so good you can just leave your four fingers on the pad without thinking about switching between them.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- rcthompson 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure the force required to click can be adjusted in the latest models.

CalRobert 11y ago

I own an XPS 13 (the 9333, the first 1920x1080 one). I have very much enjoyed it. The trackpad, to me, has been excellent, and the keyboard a delight, even with the tiny arrows, which I use constantly since they work in coordination with Fn to be Home, End, and Page up and down. There is no physical middle button, but I switched to the XPS 13 from an MBP so I am used to this arrangement. The only complaint I have is the small coil whine noticeable in quiet settings, which I believe they've fixed, the lack of anything like magsafe on the power cord, which is a patent issue, and the soldered-on ram, which is understandable given the form factor, but frustrating. I DO like that the mSATA storage is upgradable.

CydeWeys 11y ago

The XPS arrow keys don't look any different from the ones on a Macbook Pro, and those are fine. I end up using the touchpad for many of the things I used to use the arrow keys for anyway.