Hi, I hope you'll enjoy the M70. (And I hope I'll enjoy mine.)

I ordered one of these last week and am looking forward to getting it. I have a hot project waiting for it. My main concern has been for build quality. You said that it feels more solid, and that cooling appears to be improved. That's very good to hear. I don't believe you said anything about the keyboard feel. I'm concerned about that. I'm a very fast typist. I tried a Lat. D800 last week after reading a complaint (elsewhere) about keyboards on Dell notebooks in general. They keyboard on that D800 was pretty horrible, maybe even worse than the cruddy one on my old Inspiron 7500.

I don't really care if a keyboard has a detent or just a sponge-like action, as long as it is CONSISTENT. But the Inspiron 7500 used to actually throw keys off while I was typing because a key I was pressing would wobble, the edge of my fingertip would slide under the edge of an adjacent key, and that adjacent key would be launched into the air -- much to the glee of my wife, usually! Mind you, this didn't happen because I was typing forcefully. You could barely hear me typing on that thing. The problem was that the keyboard quality was dismal. The caps were very shallow, the keystroke long (relative to cap depth), and the keys were not firmly fixed upon their mechanisms.

What say you? Does the keyboard flex? Are the keys rattly and loose, or are they solid and smooth in feel and action?

Groggy people want to know...

;)

uhm :) but you are right, keyboards are maybe an underestimated factor for a notebook - so let's test it:

keyboard quality has improved (I only haven't noticed until now since I'm writing most of the time via a normal desktop keyboard - and while on trips I'm not typing much). Its very solid and every key and keystroke feels the same; well balanced, keys can't block or get stuck; medium pressure (for laptop keyboards) is required to strike a key down, you could say it gives somewhat pleassure to write on it. The whole keyboard does not flex either, it's well fixed - nearly as solid as a desktop keyboard.

But no idea if all M70 keyboards are like the one I got; with keyboards it's much like not having any dead pixels .. so: good luck!

Thank you very much for your observations. I guess there may be some variability in keyboard quality from one machine to another within a given model line, but the variation should be relatively small. The Inspiron 7500s were all terrible. A lot of notebook keyboards are. IBM and Toshiba (at least on their higher end models) seem to do a very good job of providing good, solid keyboard ergonomics and quality.

The length of the keystroke, the key spacing, the key face texture, and even the key arrangement are not terribly important to me. What is important to me is that it doesn't feel as though I'm typing on a bunch of chiclets someone spilled on a desk. Keys should not wobble, and the pressure required to depress them and depth of the keystroke should be the same for all keys. If my new notebook's keyboard just meets those criteria I'll be happy.

Againg, I thank you very much for replying. I didn't wish to highjack your thread, but I wanted the opinion of someone who had actually had one of these notebooks in hand.

Grogg

Message Edited by mac_fly37 on 02-26-2005 08:59 AM

The base, lid & LCD cover are all magnesium; the palmrest area is plastic.

The frame around the screen is also in plastik, as well the top part of the LCD cover (in order to let the radio waves pass through).

3DMark03: 7691 (OC core/mem: 335/750 - Pentium M 1,86GHz)

I forgot the driver version: 67.71