Keyboard question

@Arcamm  I forgot that there’s also the Latitude 9510. It’s closer to a Vostro in the sense that it’s a directly business-oriented line, but Latitudes are more expensive, and this is the current top-end model of the lineup.

It's a situational issue.  This laptop sits on a small table about 4" above the arm rest of a theater chair, so my left elbow rests on the arm rest and my arm is elevated up to the keyboard.  My arm rests on the laptop corner and I can work for hours like this.  With the shifted touch pads, my wrist rests right on the corner and that gets painful after about 10 minutes.  This setup is about 99% of this laptops function, and I need it to be comfortable.  I tried using a M2800 but wound up giving it to my wife and my G3 i5 Vostro is getting a bit long in the tooth.

The irritating thing is, Dell's website is all but worthless as far as showing the features of their laptops!  Only the XPS has a clear picture of the keyboard.  The rest don't and the descriptions are just not there. You have to read between the lines to figure out things like keyboard layout.  Even the chat people can't figure it out.  I spent hours with chat and looking over the webpage and could not figure it out.  Several correct pictures and it would have taken minutes to find what I want. 

But thanks for the information.  This will help me a lot! 

@Arcamm  Happy to help, and I absolutely agree about the difficulty in getting a detailed photo of a given laptop's keyboard layout.  I've sometimes had luck with third party review sites if I can't find what I need from Dell.  And I absolutely scrutinize the keyboard layout, because I'm a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts, so I care where keys like PgUp/Dn and Home/End are located, whether there are dedicated keys of Fn-mapped keys for those purposes, etc.  And that incidentally reminds me of one of the issues with the new XPS 15 9500.  Previous XPS 15 models had Home/End mapped to Fn+Left/Right, but with the new 9500, Dell moved those to be mapped as Fn+F11 and F12 or something, and they REMOVED the ability to trigger those functions via Fn+Left/Right, even though nothing ELSE was mapped to that combination.  The aggravation there is that PgUp and PgDn are still in the arrow key area where they've always been, which means that even though PgUp/Dn and Home/End are often used together to navigate various interfaces, they're now on opposite ends of the keyboard rather than right near each other.  Dell made that change on the XPS 13 model line a few generations ago, and it has provoked several gripe threads here, some of them quite long, and predictably when they more recently did this on the XPS 15 and new XPS 17, it's provoking gripes from buyers of those systems.  Some have gone as far as returning the system over this, and I can see why.

The most frustrating thing of all is that it would be absolutely trivial for Dell to provide a firmware update to restore the ability ALSO activate Home/End via Fn+Left/Right even if those keys aren't marked as such.  (This incidentally is the exact design Lenovo implements on some of their systems....)  I hope that whoever within Dell pushed for this design change starting years ago with the XPS 13 sees the error of their ways and relents, ideally including a firmware update for existing systems rather than just fixing this for future systems.

Skip forward to 2022 , just wen t to buy a Dell 2 in one and all models now DONT have numeric keypads, even the top of the line Latitude business  9510 series , none of the Latitude , on the Vostro models have a numeric keypad included in the keyboard layout , and there is no touch screen model on the Vostro, Why on earth would Dell remove the numeric keypad on a huge range if business computers ?

Yea for Dell for removing the numeric pad (at least as an option)!  I'm tired of sitting off-center of my laptop for those rarely-used keys (I'm a software engineer, not an accountant).