The XPS Keyboard Into
Breaking from the old and moldy, the Dell XPS M1730 (and some Vostro 17" models) now sport a much newer keyboard design featuring a full-sized numeric keypad.
The keypad is a very welcome change for quite a lot of people. These have been around from other 17" laptop vendors for many years, but for some reason Dell just never adopted it before.
This was also one of the features that excited me most about the XPS M1730 too.
The M1730 keyboard has pretty much the same overall feel and construction quality as the older designs, plus it has handy back-lit keys.
The Layout - Short-Bus Keys
But I have a less favorable feeling about the layout of the keys.
On the older keyboards, there were two rows of half-sized keys at the top-right side of the keyboard where most of the special keys reside... delete, home, page-up, page-down, etc. The nice thing about dell's old design was that the keys had the same relative layout as a desktop keyboard in that the insert key was above the delete key, the home was above the end, and page-up was above page-down... in that order.
On the new keyboard, there is no second row of keys at the top.
As you can see from the diagram, all of the special keys are in the same row as the function keys (F1 - F12). This breaks the normal pattern of use for these keys. I thought that this would be something I'd just get used, but after about 120 hours of use I've discovered that the positioning of these keys still annoys me just as much as when I started.
This laptop is marketed heavily toward gamers, so the breaking of the traditional relationships between these keys makes little sense. Games often map commands to these specific keys based on their relative positions so it seems strange that dell would choose to break the traditional pattern here. As a programmer I make frequent use of all of these keys so it does have quite an impact on me too.
No sleep for you hippie!
Another thing that annoys me is that the old "sleep" key (fn + Esc) is absent on this keyboard. Instead they have a new hibernate key (fn + F1). Sure, hibernate is "safer" for your data, but with 4GB of RAM hibernate also takes a LOT of time to get into and out-of.
The first thing most technical and power users do is turn off the "sleep when the lid is closed" feature... yes... that feature REALLY pisses us off!
So this leaves the XPS without an actual "sleep" button or key combination. There is, as far as I can find, no way to remap the fn + F1 key to sleep mode.
If you are like me and aren't going to be leaving the laptop unused for a week, then you will highly favor sleep mode so you don't have to wait 5 minutes before you can pack up and move. Vista is smart enough to power back up from sleep mode and do a formal hibernate if the battery starts to run dangerously low while the system sleeps.
The fact that the system might automatically power up from sleep to hibernate is something you should keep that in mind!.
Laptops run hot very quickly if they don't get good air-flow. If you store it in a laptop bag and it comes on to hibernate, it could overheat itself before it finishes hibernating... I've had that happen with my old Inspiron before, and I'm sure the XPS is more prone to this due to the more powerful components.
For this reason I always store my laptop with the back-vents up, and leave the top open... just in case.
Don't plan on taking any breaks!
And one other minor annoyance for me is the strange location of the pause key. The old keyboard layout had a dedicated key for pause/break, but this one moves it to fn+F12. When you are playing a game and need to take a break, it is quite annoying to have to go looking around for the magic key combination.
As a programmer I run into the problem with the other function for this key, the break command which is used by many development tools. Fortunately the tools I use can remap this command, but command line debuggers and compilers often do not.
Oddly enough, it does sport a dedicated print screen button. Surely it would make more sense to the vast majority of users, gamer and regular folk both, to have pause there instead of print screen?
Touch Pad:
The touch pad is not worth much talking about. It is a standard Synaptics touchpad and is pretty common these days on must about all laptops. It has a shape that is close to proportional with the wide-screen display, and has the expected two buttons and scroll regions. It is also pressure sensitive and has good configuration tools for sensitivity and pointer control... nothing special or new here.
The touchpad does appear very small, but that's just because the rest of the laptop is so big. I've compared it to my old Inspiron and it's the exact same size and shape. There really isn't much room to have mounted a larger touchpad anyway and just about everyone will prefer an external wireless mouse anyway.
The only notable thing about the touchpad is that it has a really pretty LED back-light that causes the giant XPS logo in the middle to glow... and you can set it for any of 16 amazingly bright colors.
Bottom line:
In general I'm happy to have a real number pad back. I've been using laptops for so long now that I'd gotten used to not having one and no longer miss them. Having it back is like getting to known an old friend again.
On the flip side though, I find that having the main keys offset from the center of the screen is annoying. With desktop keyboards you can physically move it around so you are centrally aligned with the screen, on a laptop you are stuck with the offset position and end up sitting off to the left of center when using the machine.
I personally prefer the older Dell keyboard designs without the keypad, but that's probably a minority opinion. Most people learned to type on a desktop, and loosing the numberpad really annoys them, as it did me when I first made the switch to laptops. So having the keypad will outweigh any other aspect for the majority.
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