On 13-Sep-08 09:16:43, Chris G wrote:
My wife's laptop has just expired (or at least XP on it has
started
BSOD'ing, needs a re-install at the very least) so she's looking for a replacement.
She doesn't *really* need a full-blown laptop and size and weight are important because she does have to lug it around with her quite a lot so the EEE PC might be a good choice.
However she needs to be able to touch type on it, does+ anyone here have an EEE PC? Is the keyboard OK? Is the 'bigger' EEE PC keyboard better? Any other suggestions?
-- Chris Green
I have an Eee PC 900 (Linux). I don't know if this has a "bigger" keyboard (probably yes, since there's no room for anything bigger).
The layout is, by and large, standard (except that the "#~" key, usually at the right of the "ASD..." row and left of the CR key, has moved up to the extreme right of the "QERTY..." row, so is not where a touch typist would expect to find it).
The main exception to standard is that the standard ASCII characters "" and "|" require special manoeuvres:
"": Fn+"Z" "|": Shift+Fn+"Z"
which is almost certain to cross wires in the touch-typing circuits!
One potentially useful extra is that some accented characters from ISOLatin-1 are marked on the keyboard as
á: Alt+"A" é: Alt+"E" í: Alt+"I" ó: Alt+"O" ú: Alt+"U"
with Shift+<above> for the upper-case versions. However, there doesn't seem to be provision for other accented characters such as à, â, è, ê, î, ô, not to mention å, ç, ñ, ø, etc., all of which one may well need to use if using the provided ones at all. Maybe ASUS had the Italian market in mind???
That being said, I find the size of the keyboard to be just adequate for my fingers, though it takes a few minutes adaptation when I switch from a "normal" board.
Hoping this helps, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Sep-08 Time: 10:56:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------