Comment by bonesinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonesinger | Hacker News Reader

I am an owner of this new Vaio Z. The laptop itself is amazing: the battery life is excellent, good performance, high quality screen (1080p), extremely fast (raid 0 SSDs will do that).

The specs are amazing for this 2.5 lb laptop, but it still doesn't do justice to how disappointed I am with the keyboard. The travel distance is so minuscule, its uncomfortable to type on. You find yourself slapping keys but feeling like you didn't really press the key. The space bar sucks, you have to hit it pretty hard to make it register.

The trackpad is pretty small and awful, 2-finger gestures only works 50% of the time. I had to disable the fingerprint reader because it would activate everytime using the touchpad (you would always hit it by mistake).

Those are literally the only 2 things I dislike about this laptop, the keyboard and touchpad. I use a portable bluetooth mouse a lot (Razer Orochi) which does alleviate a lot of the touch pad issues, but the keyboard is god awful.

That said, the power media dock is a novel feature, external graphics, blu ray and all...I haven't used it once haha. I think that's because I have a nice custom built desktop, no reason to use the PMD.

EDIT: The keyboard is worse in my opinion in comparison to a macbook air which I owned for a year before I sold it.

I just wanted to add on top that, I tested out a Lenovo T420 edge...quite possibly one of the nicest keyboards I've ever typed on.

The touchpad and keyboard on my 2009 Macbook Pro are perhaps my favorite parts. I would have never believed that a touchpad could be as good, let alone better than a mouse! Resizing and scrolling with gestures is amazing.

The trackpad on MacBooks blow away any PC laptop I've ever used. I don't understand why PC manufacturers don't just source the same supplier as Apple unless a) it's actually a software driver issue, or b) Apple has a monopoly on the supplier/patent/part. I suspect it's a little of both, as the trackpad on my Dell hackintosh runs much better in OSX than Windows.

I believe Apple have been designing their own trackpads for a couple of years now (IIRC it started with the clickwheel iPods)

I have been hearing this (the apple touchpad being better than a mouse) for a few years now. I just got my first macbook pro today and I'm hating the touchpad (I prefer edge-scrolling and the tap-click on PC touchpads, although I've never loved any touchpad). Am I doing something wrong or does this just boil down to personal taste? I really don't understand how a touchpad could ever be preferable to a mouse (the mouse-wheel is a wonderful invention).

You can enable tap-click on the Mac too. It's just not on by default. I find touchpad scrolling on the Mac to be far more precise and comfortable than side-scrolling. I'd say give it a week.

I think you just need time. Why edge scroll when you could use the entire mousing surface for scrolling? I don't know why tap-click is not on by default, but you can enable it. Also don't go changing the tracking speed or acceleration on your trackpad either. Give it some time if it feels odd. Its pretty much perfect.

So everything is great about the laptop except for the two main ways you interface with it.

pretty much, its an amazing machine, except for the keyboard, and touchpad.

I could be nitpicking since its still a nice keyboard. However, for that price, you should expect perfection.

The main way you interface with a computer (that's not a server) is the screen.

I also have a Z. The keyboard isn't great, but I got used to it. The only real problem I have with it is the shift key. On the other hand, it got the arrow keys right--they're actually full-sized unlike the mini ones that other manufacturers (Apple included) seem to like. I've spent hours programming on the keyboard and it's been fine.

The fans are loud, but only if you use a significant amount of CPU, which I almost never do. If some errant process cough flash cough is taking up too much, I can hear it and deal with it (this alleviates the annoyance a bit).

The trackpad, on the other hand, is brilliant. Using multiple fingers works every time (on Linux, anyhow) and it's actually pleasant to use. I think that all your issues with it would be resolved with Linux; the bloatware is also gone. I've played around with Mac trackpads, and like this one more.

Surprising. The trackpad works well enough but when I do gestures the don't always get recognized, which leads to frustration.

Have you had problems with the space bar? I have to press it harder than normal to get it to register.

EDIT: I've been meaning to install linux on it, now I have a real good reason to try it out. What distro are you using?

I'm using Fedora 15 with KDE, which is running wonderfully. I had to upgrade one package to get KDE to play well, but I think that's fixed in Fedora 16 which is current.

I have not had any issues with the space bar--my only problem has been with the left shift key.

I have to add that the only gestures I've actually used are multiple finger scrolling, pressing with multiple fingers and circular scrolling (which is pretty cool). I don't have zooming--it tends to annoy me more often than not, so I don't know if that works well (or at all) on Linux.

It's either a T420 or Edge E420. Edge is more of a budget-priced ThinkPad.

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