Notebook design: ten things we hate

Summary: A design flaw in piece of personal technology like a notebook computer is irritating and can seriously impair your productivity. Here are ten of our biggest bugbears.

 |  Image 1 of 10

Poor keyboard quality
A notebook with a bad keyboard is nigh-on unusable (unless you're a devotee of speech-recognition software). With keyboards, we always look for good build quality, minimal flex, reasonable depth of key travel and a nice 'click' when keys are pressed. Any keyboard that has too much flex or gives too little feedback is likely to get a big thumbs-down from us (as it were).

 

  • Thumbnail 1
  • Thumbnail 2
  • Thumbnail 3
  • Thumbnail 4
  • Thumbnail 5
  • Thumbnail 6
  • Thumbnail 7
  • Thumbnail 8
  • Thumbnail 9
  • Thumbnail 10

Topics: Laptops, Hardware, Reviews

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Talkback

2 comments
Log in or register to join the discussion
  • modem dongles

    I agree totally with the USB stick and modem dongles they are a real menace to fix and balance on the smaller/ lower machines, perhaps the two parties should look at that together, can't understand why modem could not be made vertical or in a less obtrusive shape -do they have to be that long ??
    utzy
  • Things I hate ...

    are for once stories I have to read building up one sentence per page, seeing the monitor flicker and waiting times a could have read ten of these stories.
    Unless you change your way of presentation, you will not find me looking again at it.
    HorstBK