I pretty much despise laptops/notebooks/netbooks/ultrabooks whatever they're calling them these days, but my wife likes to travel (I despise traveling, too-- just call me a grumpy old curmudgeon) and fortunately she doesn't make me go with her. Her Samsung netbook died while she was in Alaska, so she made me get a replacement and send it to her. Of course, before it arrived, her Samsung came back to life (a flaky power switch that has behaved perfectly ever since) so now she has two travel computers.

I am presently in California, taking care of her while she recovers from [elective] back surgery, so I have temporarily inherited the new computer. I am absolutely astonished by how much computing power you can buy for $250 these days.

This computer could never, ever replace my desktop computer. After a few hours or work I have tweaked the Windows 8.1 OS until it is in a frequently usable state, the bootup time is amazingly fast (I don't think it's booting, it's coming out of sleep mode), the screen is really, really good... the keyboard may be the worst I have ever typed on.

Normally I am a 90+ word per minute typist. This keyboard I don't dare go more than about 40. It's as though there is no key-ahead buffer. Go too fast and it drops letters. I have to concentrate on carefully executing each keypress, rather than typing words and sentences. In this short post I have already had to go back and insert missing letters at least 15 times.

But... for $250, how can I complain? It's a full-size keyboard with number pad and dedicated cursor control keys, and so far has been absolutely reliable, no forced reboots or anything.

I wish it had come with MS-Office, but of course at that price it couldn't. I downloaded and installed the Open Office freeware, but it didn't have the power I needed. It couldn't load my Library Index spreadsheet--about 7500 rows by maybe 15 columns, full of all kinds of conditional formatting and macros. The progress bar would get about a third of the way, and then it would lock up. Tried several times. It DID load a subset of the file, when I stripped out half the rows, two-thirds of the columns, and all the formatting. Not useful.

Anyway, I thought I'd ramble on and give my opinion. For the price it is one hell of a computer, but I could never use it as my only computer. Strictly an emergency/travel machine.

tanstaafl.

The missing letters thing might be an application bug, and not necessarily OS or computer dependent. It shouldn't drop letters no matter how fast you type. Just out of curiosity, if you just open up Notepad and type into that, can you type up to your full speed?

Another thing it might be is a bug in the keyboard or keyboard firmware, such that it cannot detect a letter when certain pairs of letters are pressed at the same time. Do you find it's only with certain letter combinations that it drops?

I must say that a nearly 16 inch screen with that resolution would be, for me, a rather coarse grained visual experience.

That said, I expect it is quite bright and perhaps has strong colors.

Even nnnn x 1080 screens seem mid-range now.

I rarely take my laptop anymore when traveling.

I find my iPad with iPhone companion to be more compact and functional enough.

The (Apple) laptop is mostly reserved for the 'heavy duty' work when I get back home.

the Surface folks have doubled down on the "we're more like a computer than an iPad" and they're probably right, for the same form factor... if you want to run Windows. I kinda wonder if it would be about as much use to me as a netbook... (that is to say, probably not much.)

Interesting When I type i notepad, I don't seem to get missing letters. But typing emails or typing hre i the BS I do. I am leavig this post ucorrected so you can see the problem. I count seven missing letters in the above sentences.

The ost comonly missed letter is the "space",and the period is also frequently missed. Three more missed letters in the previous sentence Now, four counting the missed period after the word "sentence".

I absolutely understand that this computer cannot compare to, say, a MacBook Pro or something. But at the price, it is amazing I remember paying 15 times the price for a computer with perhaps oe-tenth the performance.


tanstaafl.

I've got an Acer S7 Ultrabook, which is a Core i5. It's stupid-quick. However, the keyboard and trackpad are shockingly bad. I'm not a particularly heavy-handed typist, but the S7 regularly double-types characters if I'm not paying it due respect.

However, after I've been using it for an hour or so, somehow I figure out the keyboard and it stops misbehaving. In the past I've used it for days at a time without problems.

My point is this: the price is no indicator of the keyboard quality (the S7 was far from cheap, but it is very very pretty). Also that, with a bit of use, your fingers will probably get used to the keyboard, with marginal loss of typing speed.

Can't seem to do anything about the shoddy trackpad, though...

That was absolutely the FIRST deficiency of this computer that I solved -- USB Mouse.

tansaafl.

This may indeed be where the performance gap really lies. Performance, in my view, is not merely the CPU power, the memory size or the storage capacity.

These things have long since risen beyond the threshold of sufficient, for most users with typical daily computing tasks.

There are a host of other factors which are in my view more important. Quality of the surrounding hardware is a huge issue. The keyboard, trackpad, battery life, case/shell durability/weight/feel and the display are all areas where better quality really does make a difference.

There is also the issue of the software within the hardware. The keyboard subsystem has one or two processors of its own, the trackpad may have another. Each has software/firmware, quite separate from Windows itself.

And then there are the 'drivers'. Dozens of them, some from Microsoft, some from hardware OEMs or even the chipset makers. A different brew with each different collection of chipsets and hardware devices.

The user experience of the resulting computer is the aggregate of all these pieces. Hence the Apple approach often being applauded for getting most of it right and having generally few issues with subsystems not behaving.

It is entirely possible for a modern Windows computer to get all this stuff right and deliver a solid product. Often enough, nobody in the supply chain is getting paid enough to bother.

As I suspected. Application bug, not the computer's fault or the OS's fault. Which application are you using to type your emails and BBS posts? Web browser, right? Which one?

First try making sure that it's not a problem with having too many tabs open at once. Close all tabs except the one where you're typing the message. Does the problem go away?

Next, look to see if the web browser has any add-ins which may be interfering. Try disabling all add-ins and plug-ins and extensions and whatnot and see if the problem goes away. If so, then re-enable the plug-ins one at a time until the problem recurs. Then you've found the culprit.

If that doesn't work, search the web to see if other users of that web browser have encountered the same problem. Perhaps it's some kind of configuration setting, or known issue.

Finally, try a different web browser to see if the problem is solved by a different web browser. I list this one last because I know that for some people, their choice of web browser is non-negotiable.

Latest Firefox.

Rarely more than two tabs.

Five of them: Google Earth, Google Update, LastPass, Shockwave Flash, and VLC.

I'm not sure how to do that. All of them are set to "Ask to Activate", does that mean they aren't running unless I do something?

It isn't only the web browser giving the problem. At least, I don't think so. I don't have a lot of programs installed in this computer to test it with, however. The OpenOffice word processing program also gives trouble, but not nearly as much as when typing on-line.

Yeah, there's Internet Explorer on this computer. I can give that a try, if I can figure out how to start it up. OK, the post immediately following this one is done with Internet Explorer.

Interesting...

tanstaafl.

This is a test to see if the keyboard works better in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox. So far, it appears to be better. No dropped letters yet, and usually by this time I could expect to see half a dozen or more. So maybe Tony is correct, and it is some basic incompatibility with Firefox or one of its plugins.

Interesting...

tanstaafl.

My guess is that your problem is either Firefox all by itself (unlikely but possible), or one of those plug-ins. Of all the plug-ins that might cause an issue with keyboard input, my first instinct is to check see if it's LastPass causing the interference. Since that plug-in specifically hooks into text input fields on the web browser, it's the first one to to look at. The others, I wouldn't expect could have any impact on browser text input.

On Firefox, I don't know how to temporarily disable plug-ins, since I'm a Chrome user these days. Anyone know?