Finding your Netbook Trackpad hard to use? Read these essential tips!

How to make the best use of your Touchpad

Lets be honest, these laptop touchpads aren’t as good as using a mouse. There is no escaping this fact. If you have just bought a laptop or sub-notebook and have found yourself struggling to use the touchpad then you are not alone! They suck.

This guide provides some great tips for making the experience more tolerable. Although it is aimed at NC10 owners, other netbook owners may find it useful!

The NC10 Trackpad
Some trackpads are worse than others and sadly many agree that the Samsung NC10 trackpad could have been a little better in a number or respects:

• It could have been bigger. The frustration here is that there is a little extra space on the NC10 chassis for a slightly bigger pad. Not that much bigger. But they could have squeezed a few more millimeters into the touchpad if they had tried real hard! There is already rumour of a new Samsung Netbook release with a larger touchpad built in.
• The trackpad is hard to locate, the edge around the scroll area is not very pronounced making it hard to tell where it starts and ends.
• It is off centre. Although I think I prefer it directly below the space bar.
• And finally, it’s not a mouse!

How to improve your netbook’s trackpad
So what can be done to improve the NC10 trackpad experience? Read on to see what members of the Samsung NC10 owners’ community have been doing to get the best out of it!

Standard Usage
Here are a couple of pointers on basic usage. Skip past this if you are already familiar with the basic use of a touchpad. However questions on these tips do come up regularly on the beginners forum so this will be news to some of you!

Tap: An alternative to using the mouse button is to tap the touchpad. If you tap and leave your finger on the touchpad you can then also drag files etc around the screen.

Scroll: In the default configuration, the area to the right and bottom of the touchpad are designated scroll areas. By simulating the motion below you can scroll up and down a web page or from left to right. This saves having to move the mouse pointer over to the windows scroll bar to do the same.

Pinch: This allows you to zoom in and out when applications allow. For example in IE you can make the font size bigger or smaller with this funtionality. It is probably more useful in a photo editing package.

Synaptics Touchpad Configuration Options
The defult configuration of the Netbook trackpad is arguably not going to be the best configuration for most users. I therefore strongly recommend that any netbook owner should go through the many options available through the Synaptics Touchpad configuration screen. These settings will apply to any netbook that uses the same drivers.

This can be found under:
Control Panel -> Mouse -> Device Settings -> Settings

So what options are there to play with?

• The overview page:
  This just introduces you to the config pages, not much here to help to be honest!
  
• Tapping:
  Tapping allows you to simulate a mouse click by tapping the touchpad. Turn this off if you are prone to accidentally “clicking” the mouse when you are using the touchpad.
  • Tap and Drag allows you to tap twice and drag objects around your desktop, with the smaller NC10 touchpad it might also be useful to enable locking drag to move objects further than the touchpad allows.
  • Tap Zones lets you set different functions for each of the corners of the touchpad. So you could set the top left to be a left mouse click for example. The most useful configuration I’ve found here is setting a web browser Back and Forward zone.
  
• Buttons:
  This controls the configuration of the mouse buttons. If you use taps or tapzones to simulate mouse clicks then you can set the buttons up to do something more useful. Anything from Search, browser controls through to the Windows Start button.
  
• Virtual Scrolling:
  This allows you to scroll windows vertically or horizontally by dragging along the right or bottom of the trackpad. There is also a 3rd option here – ChiralMotion scrolling. This means that you can make circular motions to scroll continuously down a window without having to lift up your finger each time you reach the end of the touchpad!You can also configure the following from this menu:
  • Long Distance Scrolling: Enables a coasting feature that helps scroll through long documents.
  • Scrolling Region: This is where you can set the size of the side scroll regions. If they are hard to trigger or you hit it accidentally then changing the layout is straight forward.
  • Scrolling Selection: By default you will scroll the selected item but you can configure it to scroll the item under the pointer.
  
• Pointer Motion:
  This configuration screen specifies how the mouse pointer responds to the touches you make on the touchpad.
  • EdgeMotion: This function is useful if you often find yourself running out of space on the trackpad. Switch this on and when you reach the edge of the touchpad the pointer will continue moving until you remove your finger! You are able to configure the size of the region around the edge of your touchpad that will trigger this and also the behaviour of the pointer movement. The EdgeMotion speed can be configured to be pressure sensitive or fixed.
    
  • Constrained Motion: This allows you to fix the movement of the pointer in a particular direction. It is activated by pressing a key (eg Shift), the mouse pointer will then only move in the direction that you first start off in. Surely only useful for drawing straight lines?
  • Slow Motion:This is activated by a configured key and will result in reduced sensitivity. Useful if you regularly require very fine mouse pointer movements.
  • Sticky Borders:When activated the mouse pointer is restricted to the active window only. This makes it very easy to access controls located at the edge of windows. You can release the pointer from the window by attempting to move it a second time.
  • Momentum: This option allows the trackpad to behave more like a trackball. It enables you to “roll” the mouse cursor around the screen. It can take a bit of getting used to and I suggest starting off with a low glide setting but this option is actually worth experimenting with in my opinion.
    
  • Pinch: The pinch function replicates the traditional functionality of CTRL+mouse scroll wheel. In many applications this allows you to zoom in or out. Place to fingers on the touchpad, move them apart to zoom out or move them together to zoom in!
  • Pointer Refresh Rate: This can help smooth the mouse movement on slower computers, it should not be necessary on an NC10.
• Sensitivity:
  These settings allow you to personalise how the touchpad responds to your touch.
  • PalmCheck: This feature should reduce the chance of registering accidental brushes with the touchpad. However by turning this up to the maximum setting you may then miss genuine taps. I have mine set to max but you may want to reduce this if you have problems registering “mouse clicks”.
  • Touch Sensitivity: This is where you can configure how much pressure is required before your touchpad responds.
  

What is the perfect configuration?
No one can answer this for you. As you can see above there are many different ways to setup the touchpad and I have highlighted some of the things that I have used and found useful. I have also mentioned some of the things that look like a waste of time! But really it will depend on how you use your notebook and what software you operate on a regular basis. The key, as always, is to experiment for yourself and don’t be afraid to try out new options for a few days. You can always switch back to the default settings if you wish!

Two Fingered Scroll
Mac users will already be familiar with this concept, but thanks to a good spot from Jonbad two fingered scrolling isn’t far away from any NC10 owner’s reach! For more background, check out the original thread that prompted the author to start this project!

This app allows you to imitate a mouse wheel scrolling function by using two fingers. This then enables you to turn off the side scroll area to all for more space on your trackpad overall. You can also use it for two finger clicking, very useful if, like me, you regularly accidently invoke a tap-to-click.

Currently supported gestures:

• Two finger scrolling – scroll vertically by sliding two fingers anywhere on the TouchPad
• Two finger tapping – tap with two fingers to simulate a selected mouse button

If you are interested in trying out this application then you can get it here. NC10 owners should also read this thread from the SammyNetbook.com forum to see how people have got on with this enhancement.

DIY Touchpad improvements
A couple of SammyNetbook.com members have posted up some examples of how they have improved the physical feel of their trackpads! These changes may not be to everyone’s taste but they have clrealy helped some of you out!

• Buttons: discussed in this thread
• Trackpad edges. One user suggested sticking thick tape around the edges of the pad so that you can detect the edges more easily.

What’s next?

• Bigger touchpad on new models
• Touchless touch: This is an experimental idea from Microsoft that uses the webcam to capture hand movements and manipulate the mouse pointer much like a touchscreen but with no need to actually touch the screen. Still in early development but there are some demo programs around to play with!
• Samsung NC10 touch screen kit: Enterprising techies have managed to fit touch screens on a range of sub notebooks already. It is a matter of time before a dedicated NC10 version becomes available at a good price!

The Obvious Alternative
Buy a compact wireless bluetooth mouse! Yes – that’s right, forget about the trackpad alltogether and stick to something you know and love. The good old squeaky mouse. Of course you don’t want to be stuck with a large clumpy mouse stuck into the side of your ultra portable netbook! You’ll want to investigate:

• Mini Mice
• Retractable mouse leads
• Bluetooth Mouse – ideal for Samsung NC10 netbooks that came with Bluetooth (not all models).

I compliment my NC10 with a wireless Logitech V220. Check out the SammyNetbook.com Community travel mouse page!

Your say
Do you have any tips for making the most of the trackpad? Any good programs to enhance it’s functionality? Let us know how you have set yours up.

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