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130

Fix The Awful Volume Control & Media Buttons Buttons On The XPS M1330

130 points posted to Accessories (Keyboards, etc.), XPS products by scubby May 11

The media control buttons are the biggest downfall of this product for a variety of reasons:

1) There's no tactile feel...so when pressing F9 & F10 repeatedly (popular for anyone doing debugging), you constantly hit the eject button by accident. What's worse: when you do this: the laptop freezes for a second and the music skips.

2) You can't quickly adjust the sound volume. The current process is to just hold your finger on the button and wait for the volume to change. Very unintuitive.

My solution:
1) Give the media buttons tactile feel.
2) Replace the volume +/- buttons with a slider component, which would allow the user to slide a finger up and down the face of the laptop to adjust the volume. This would eliminate the need for a mute button: You could just slide your finger all the way to the bottom very quickly to mute the sound.

winoffice
May 11		 Point 1 is interesting, but I disagree with point 2.
matt_d
May 11		 The laptop freeze problem noted in #1 should be resolved with BIOS A10 released this past week.
scubby
May 11		 Why do you disagree with point #2?
Every piece of software I've ever seen with a volume control function (Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, the Google Video Player, the YouTube player) uses a slider to control the volume. Imagine how crufty it would be to force the user to have to click + and - buttons to adjust the volume in the GUI in these applications. Why is a laptop interface any different?
freemenow
May 14		 My suggestion is to have Volume up, Volume down and Mute mapped to FN+F9, FN+F10 and FN+F11.

There is no need for additional keys or sliders! Less stuff there is, less stuff is going to break. And we will also pay less.
scubby
May 14		 A touch-based slider would reduce the number of media buttons—it would eliminate the need for a volume up button, a volume down button and a mute button.
How would adding FN+F9 s support be any different than what we already have? It's still pressing buttons repeatedly to adjust the volume.
winoffice
May 14		 I disagree with point 2 because I like the media buttons as they are now. They just need to be moved to the front and look like those on the Vostro 1700 (if possible).
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