painless solutions without driver hassles

Over the months I've encountered many users publishing negative feedback regarding the ElanTech SmartPad. This is one of the key discerning points of Asus's 10 inch netbook family. Unlike the 70x and 90x models, the touchpad is well-scaled. One finger movement covers the entire 10” display, and supports multitouch to boot.

That means you might never need to ever poke at Page Up/Down commands, or look for the picture zoom and rotation buttons of your favourite photo viewing software. And so on. You might, like myself, never need to stuff an external mouse in your bag, so long as you have a Eee 1000.

It's all well and good that the 1000 is one of the few multitouch capable netbooks on the market today, but there are (as usual), one or two problems.

Many new 1000x users have problems with the multitouch functions being hyper-sensitive. Two finger swipes suddenly zoom the page, and browsers suddenly flip back and forth between opened pages.

Two finger scrolls are not exactly sensitive, and may be very slow in some web browsers.

And worse, when you try a game of MechWarrior, weapons misfire and you are unable to keep up with a close quarters melee because the touchpad is clicking away or trying to scroll, seeing as you are stroking and poking it in a frenzy.

Several Eeeuser Forum members have suggested installing the Asus S101 touchpad drivers that provide some benefits including increased precision and sensitivity. However for the case of my 1000H I determined that everything worked perfectly fine out of the box that I would probably, never ever mess with the BIOS and drivers for the machine's lifetime unless something went drastically wrong.

(If you wish to add on the benefits of using the S101 drivers, or updating the standard ElanTech drivers, please do feel free to add on)

Being a short-term owner of a used Eee 701SD, I could say that the first thing I did on the little guy was turn off all the SmartPad functions since the touchpad was so tiny, it was only good for basic point and click functions. And it was not very good at the job either way.

On the 1000x, the touchpad is large enough that the multi-touch functions become a major productivity tool. But yes, I do agree that the standard, out of the box settings are way to sensitive.

Well don't start dissing it yet! I love Eee products for their low cost, feature rich and multi-role capability. Just like the Eee 701, if you don't like it, just tweak it to your liking. The 1000x being, in essence, an upsized 701 (just look at the layout), is a machine built in the same spirit.

For new users of the 1000x, I highly recommend disabling all of the multitouch functions save for tapping, two-finger scrolling, and the My Computer/Alt Tab 3-finger shortcuts. This will remove most of the complex and potentially frustrating functions that require more dexterity until you feel like experimenting.

Just follow the steps below, and you will have a functional touchpad that obeys your whim in no time at all.

1. Open the WinXP mouse properties panel. 

Do this by double clicking the touchpad/elantech logo on the system tray beside the clock, or simply open the Control Panel the normal way.

2. Go to the Pointer Options tab.

It's 3rd from the left.

3. Set Pointer Precision slider to the middle. 

This will make the touchpad width approximately equal to the screen width at native (1024×600) resolution, with some room to spare.

4. Enable Enhanced Pointer Precision. 

It's easier to click on small objects with this turned on.

5. Move on towards the last tab in the mouse properties panel. 

It is simply named “Elantech”. Open the options page. We will now go step by step to disable the more complex multitouch maneuvers.

6. Elantech Options: Buttons

Enable: Yes (default)

Left: Left click/select (default)

Middle: Disabled

Right: Pop-Up Menu (default)

7. Elantech Options: Tapping

Enable: Yes (default)

One finger: (default)

Two fingers: Disabled - contradicts too much with two finger scrolling

Three fingers: Pop-Up Menu - who needs to right click? Just poke 3 fingers in a row.

8. Elantech Options: Scrolling (2 fingers)

Enable both vertical and horizontal scrolling Increase or decrease sensitivity as required.

Try this out on explorer windows and the web browser. If you're using Firefox, disable smooth scrolling or it will bog down.

9. Elantech Options: Zooming, Rotation, Drag & Drop, Magnifying Glass

Disable these. Hard to use and conflicts with other functions.

10. Elantech Options: Swipe Page

This is wrongly documented. 3 finger horizontal swipe performs Back and Forward functions in Explorer and your web browser, not page up/down. It is safe to enable this because rarely do you ever put 3 fingers on the pad unless it were a concious effort. The motions are very sensitive but will only scroll one page at a time.

11. Elantech Options: Fast Keys

Enable it. This saves you a lot of time going to the desktop or start menu to open My Computer. You can access this from anywhere, even some fullscreen programs, serving like a rather convenient Boss Key!

3 fingers upwards produces My Computer, downwards - alt tab. Much faster than hitting the actual keys, once you get used to it.

1. Do you hit spacebar or reach to Fn+Page Down to scroll a document or web page? Simply double tap the scroll bar and perform one-finger scrolling. Very fast!
2. Are your keys hard to press? Press down gently on the chamfered edge of the keys, instead of the horizontal portion as on other laptops. Notice something different? It's very good engineering on Asus' part.
3. If you have 3 finger horizontal swipe (it's actually back/forward), you can use this to assign an additional two keys in 3D games. They are interpreted by the system as Numpad 3 and 6. As we know, laptops don't have numeric keypads so you have an additional two keys to play with.

In Mechwarrior 3 I use these for targeting next/previous enemies. Tapping/left click targets object under cursor, 3 finger tap switches to the next weapon group. Nifty eh? I haven't tried adding the ctrl/alt/shift functions to the gestured commands yet - it'll give me enough finger movements to play most of the game without ever reaching the keyboard!

Yes, this article was created and formatted using the onboard touchpad of the Eee PC 1000H. If I live without a mouse, so can you.

I'm carmenara on the Eeeuser Forums. You may disturb me at your own risk.

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