These are my quick first impressions during my first "session" with the G71-340us. I will have a lot more as time goes by...
The keyboard
The keyboard with all the extra space feels like an aircraft carrier. Very comfortable for touch-typing. The keys and keyboard have a nice feel to them, and they are very easy to touch-type as well. There is plenty of space so you can place your hands in a way that avoids accidentally touching the touch-pad which you can also deactivate if you like.
The letters are fine and the keypad numbers are fine, but as always, there is no perfect way to align or design the "extra" keys - you know, the arrows, the home/end/page-up/page-down and the like. On a really first look, it looks like the four small arrows on the bottom-left side of the "keypad" are a little bit too small. But time will tell whether I can adjust over time, or keep fumbling. Not a big deal for now.
Same smallish keys are at the top of the "keypad" for the Home/End/PgUp/PgDown. These are lined up in the above sequence. As you can guess, this is a different formation from all the other keyboards I am using. Time will tell whether I can develop "biological macros" to adjust :)
Touch-pad
The "mouse buttons" are a little bit stiff, but hey, this is the first session with the computer. They require "effort" to press, so I am guessing it will be very hard to press these accidentally. The "scroller" is clearly identified on the right side of the touch-pad.
The touch-pad "blends" with the design of the rest of the area - not sure if this is relevant :)
The lights
The lights for NUM-LOCK, CAPS-LOCK, and touch-pad are reverse pyramids in 3-2 formation of white LED (?) light. The same color of light is the power buttom which sits at the top of the keyboard area. Next to that is teh blue wireless/wifi button. Blue means on (HP Wireless Assistant), orange means disabled.
This is STUPID. The color is rather distracting. Especially the orange one. Couldn't they just turn the light off when the wifi is off? Hopefully there is an option in the menus to turn off that light. I just can't stand that orange thing!
There are three more lights on the bottom left corner, the power, charging, and hard disk buttons. Also have the mild-fluorecenty-white color.
Temperature
Too early to tell, but running it through the AC, while charging and me using it fast and furiously, it is cool to the touch on the top of the keyboard and room/body temperate on the bottom part. Not sure if this is caused by me or the computer, or both are contributing to the heat :) More on that later.
I will be trying out different laptop coolers with this for extended use. Not only those creatures are good for cooling it off, they are also an extra layer of protection between the laptop and the surface is sitting on. The horror one can find on Starbucks tables :)
Using it for an actual real-world task
Yes, that is always a good test to see how a laptop does. Trying to actually do something, not just use it willy-nilly.
Although in this case, this is a bit of a meta-usage scenario, since the real-world task was writing all these first impressions blog posts :) The good news is that I actually got "lost" in the topic during the first hour of operation, and then focused on the task at hand, as opposed to trying to "figure" things out.
This is a good sign - since I was able to get lots of things done on a brand new laptop :)
Recent Comments