Touchpad improvements for EZBOOK 3 PRO

[Peter]

Intel graphics driver improved the responsiveness of multi finger gestures a bit. The scrolling is usable but ungainly. Once you’ve got used to the flawless scrolling of a Macbook or Chromebook, you cant go back to this level, it just sucks.

[Wolf]

Peter wrote:

Intel graphics driver improved the responsiveness of multi finger gestures a bit. The scrolling is usable but ungainly. Once you’ve got used to the flawless scrolling of a Macbook or Chromebook, you cant go back to this level, it just sucks.

As I had written a few days ago

“Don’t compare these chinese tech with established brands – you did not pay the brand price of a chrome book.
If you have lower expectations you’ll might be surprised, but with a view at ms surface level this must be a crap.”

And now you are there – but that might depend on what you bought cause V6 should be considerably better and there are other vendors with far better results and no “part lottery” cause Jumper is that kind of company that changes the parts based on cheapest supplies this weeks and that happens not only with emmc, ssd … and also with touchpads.

Alldocube THinker 35 or so is my current favorite, the succesor of 4 Jumper EzBook 3 Pro V4, V5, V6 from last year and it was just 140€ more – but for 8 GB instead of 6, 256 GB SSD instead of 64 GB eMMC and pretty good working touchpad, no intel 3450 Atom or … just intel m3 .

And a MS Surface hires display – so damn good that I fear the moment I wanna move to another machine where every other display might be a desaster.

If you buy that thinker you will save a lot compared to EzBook 3 Pro V6 like

1. 80€ for an 256 GB SSD drive and at least e to 5 hours of work , no warranty violation …
2. 40€ for 2 GB more RAM
3. and then the faster M3 and far superior 14 inch surface screen is nearly for free

And surfing with chrome is a game changer if you see both machines next to each other scrolling down that spiegel.de page

The only solution for staying with that Jumper might be an external mouse – Xiaomi has a good metal one, bluetooth and wifi dongle on board.

But: none of these disadvantages of the Jumper EZBook is something new – cause it had been mentioned here from the beginning over the “what components are in my device” lottery after I had bought 3 of them in autumn in the hope to get a V6 with fast sandisk SSD – but got only the slowest emmc ones in 3 different variations bought on 1 day from 1 reseller. That is a true lottery and I did not have luck so I moved away and got exactly what Chris had described in his review and description, no negative surprise like slow emmc, other touchpad, other display panel, bios, … just that released product he had described instead of a product out of a moving sand dune where you never know what you’ll get this time or even tomorrow.

Jumper EZBook was a great milestone but again “the revolution eats its own children ” german saying from the 18 th century. Others copied Jumpers ingredients and added a product- and release management to let Jumper loose their advantage they once had.

Good luck - WOLF

[Peter]

Wolf wrote:

“Don’t compare these chinese tech with established brands – you did not pay the brand price of a chrome book.
If you have lower expectations you’ll might be surprised, but with a view at ms surface level this must be a crap.”

I think it is only Windows that bogs the touchpad down. Isn’t it?
Anybody can compare how the device performes in Linux, in particular the touchpad?

I have another 128GB Transcend SSD and might try that one.

Overall I like the Ezbook 3 pro, for the price it is just fine. I exactly new what I get, thanks to this forum (only the non working SSD came by surprise). I like the compact size, thin bezels, brilliant matt screen and symmetrically placed keyboard (no extra row).

[Chupa]

most track pads need some adjusting to the users needs.
i have a non precision no name pad in my 3s
after re-installing the touch pad blocker and some minor adjustments in the mouse driver and registry setting, all the swiped and taps I want worke like I want them and the pad works with a 2 pixel accuracy when selecting and masking in graphic programs without any zoom. 2x zoom already brings me to a 1 pixel accuracy.

The scrolling is butter smooth and fast or slow depending on my speed, I even can make the pad behave like a track ball, so it scrolls like a phone.

it is all in the amount of work you put into customizing.

Need Help?
1981 soldered my first Sinclair computer 1K, tapedeck * 1984 build and sold IBM clones 8Mhz, 512K, 20MB HDD * 2018 messing with ultrabooks

[Peter]

In my case it is clearly performance related. As you pointed me in that direction, I investigated the problem and disabled most Windows services and unnecessary programs that produce background load. Then started Chrome in safe mode (–disable-extensions). And also disabled Java script. And open 10 random tabs. The load levels when everything is loaded to 2% CPU background load, just doing nothing and not touching anything. Chrome goes down to 0% CPU in that case, i.e., behaves disciplined.

As soon as I use the touchpad to control the mousepointer, the CPU load ramps up to 15% (or more if I hoover over anything). Regarding 2 finger scrolling it depends on the complexity of the page and on scroll speed. Typical load is around 25-50%, for slow to fast scrolling, light to heavy page. As long as your load stays in that range, everything is ok (not as responsive as my Macbook/Chromebook and a little jittery but it is ok usable).

As soon as CPU load is higher, the scrolling becomes unresponsive and laggy, while the mousepointer usually still behaves well. One source of high background load are misbehaving web pages that are wasting a lot of CPU ressources using Java script even when they are not shown. Having multiple such tabs open bogs the Ezbook down quickly. So I recommend to generally disable Java script and only enable it for pages where you know what they are doing.

I would be interested if you get similar CPU loads with regular touchpad. Probably the Windows precision touch drivers need a lot more CPU and react quite sensitive to background load.

[Peter]

In particular spiegel.de produces an awful high permanent JavaScript load (80%).
You can either disable JavaScript, or use some adblocker. Or enable “Throttle expensive background timers” in chrome://flags.

[Peter]

BTW, I tried to install Synaptics driver according to this tutorial: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-enable-precision-touchpad-drivers

But that did not work out for me (Error message). Updating the driver automatically reverted to HID complient mouse (Microsoft 2006).

I find it weird that it is a driver dated back to 2006. Anybody can confirm that is the correct one?

[Peter]

Revisiting Edge browser I found out that although it does not allow disabling JavaScript, the uBlock Origin Extension does stop the extreme background traffic (Adblock didn’t). Giving Edge a huge gain in usability (though Edge doesn’t go to zero load as Chrome does).

With the background load tamed, both the browsers run much more responsive, in particular the touchpad scrolling. Edge is really smooth now.

[Wolf]

I ‘ve enabled that throttle flag cause I experience same problems regarding spiegel.de – they are trying to push readers away that way they use ads, videos and all that stuff that brings a heavy load. reading on mobile phone in browser might work everything else is a nightmare but I think I will install pi-hole to get ridd off all the stuff that makes the side so heavy and slow – and they can’t complain about “disable your adblocker”.

Finally it might be that you get a smoother scrolling experience but my pretty old june 2017 V4 modell had accuracy issues a lot , really a lot.

I was not able to move the cursor and hit things first time, cause when I saw that the cursor had been above a function icon and therefore stopped everything seems ok until I pressed to turn it on.

That press had been not used as a press or click, no first of all the cursor jumped aside away from that icon so my click was executed on another icon.
For instance clicking on word icon “BOLD” ended in activating “ITALIC”.

1 year ago and I still can remember that touchpad as it where yesterday … until I bought that Xiaomi Mouse with BT and WiFi dongle on board that solved the problem by replacing that touchpad and changing my habits.

Good luck - WOLF

[Chupa]

wolf, i agree a mouse is superior to most pads in usability – sadly no alternative for a 100% lap user
the removal of the 2 dedicated click buttons is the biggest drawback of a modern pad but this can be also solved via software where you assign a nearly never used key as a dedicated mouse button and shift with that button as a right click.
I had to learn that because of failing pad buttons after years of use.

to the rest of you guys, I do not use any chromium related browsers – Chrome, Opera, etc.
I try to avoid google (alphabet) products also MS browsers and products since they are very intrusive.
I use firefox portable as my main browser and waterfox if i need old plugins to work.
both work with ublock origin and duckduckgo privacy essentials together to keep data harvesting at bay.
If you read my jumper diary you know through what hoops i jumped to make windows behave and keep the MS data harvesting to an absolutely minimum.
If you look in my help section you see that I even made GTAV playable on the apollo lake – if you block / disable enough of the background processes and services the jumper is not slower than my non optimized i7 with 16 GB ram regarding most browsing tasks.

Need Help?
1981 soldered my first Sinclair computer 1K, tapedeck * 1984 build and sold IBM clones 8Mhz, 512K, 20MB HDD * 2018 messing with ultrabooks

[Peter]

Chupa wrote:

wolf, i agree a mouse is superior to most pads in usability

I strongly tend towards touchpads and find it by far superior to a mouse in practically every aspect. With a good touchpad you have less hand travel between the keyboard and the navigation device, you have multiple fingers and gestures, while pointer precision is more or less on par with maybe the edge towards the touchpad as positioning a fingertip is biomechanically more precise than moving a mouse. I also see a slight edge regarding general speed of pointer positioning for the touchpad (less mass to accelerate) and a big advantage in scrolling (pixel smooth scroll, flick with inertia). The main advantage of the touchpad however is ergonomics, it is just a more relaxed and natural hand position. And, last but not least, you don’t require a stable underground to use it which gives more freedom to find a relaxed body position and also change body position every now and then.
Regarding the buttons I prefer a firm touchpad, without physical push, it is just quicker and doesn’t wear out.
However a touchpad has to be really precise and responsive to work at its full potential. A non issue on MacBooks and also Chromebooks have it solved. It’s only Windows where touchpads are so sluggish.

[Chupa]

i never had a sluggish touch pad since windows 95
the first is i always change 3 settings
pointer speed and
activate enhance pointer precision then
choose either a big or now my own partially animated pointers

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Need Help?
1981 soldered my first Sinclair computer 1K, tapedeck * 1984 build and sold IBM clones 8Mhz, 512K, 20MB HDD * 2018 messing with ultrabooks

[Peter]

Chupa wrote:

i never had a sluggish touch pad since windows 95

Pointer works fine. It’s only the scrolling that is problematic. You can see the difference between Microsoft Edge, which seemingly better precision touch implementation, and Chrome or Opera which are just not as smooth. Also in the other apps it is a hit or miss experience, every app seems to differ in scrolling.
Also the touchpad is extremely load dependent and seems to crash occasionally, probably after sleep/resume, and requires to restart the session.

[Chupa]

never had these problems not even with the 2gb/32gb hp stream
also not with the 4gb/64gb T-bao with atom or 3350 thomson or 3450 jumper

it looks to me you either have a major driver problem or a defect pad

i heard from some people who had pad problems after windows update to a newer redstone version.
I am on redstone 1 with the atom and 2 with the 2 apollo lakes.
never updated anything and never will.

Need Help?
1981 soldered my first Sinclair computer 1K, tapedeck * 1984 build and sold IBM clones 8Mhz, 512K, 20MB HDD * 2018 messing with ultrabooks

[Peter]

Chupa, the touchpad scroll issue it is a well known issue in Windows that exists since the advent of touchpads. And was the reason I switched from Windows to Macbook years ago. They simply emulate cursor click to scroll, as does the mousewheel. With “precision touchpads” Microsoft tried to fix that, but it still lacks in the details.  Most programs just do not support it. Regarding Chrome, the scrolling has gotten huge improvements recently, see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/8793q5/precision_touchpad_support_on_latest_chrome_canary/

Scrolling now in Chrome works pixel smooth if you scroll slow, but gets jittery if you scroll faster. It jumps multiple pixels but also isn’t completely in sync, but more stop and go like. It works a tad better in Edge Browser. Theres some slight lag from swipe to resulting scrolling, also speed is not exactly concordant.

Probably you only realize that if you’re coming from Tablets/Chromebook/MacBook. For me it is one of the most important feature as I am used to read while scrolling.

The scrolling is performance related, as the load ramps high. When fast scrolling on techtablets.com, for example, I get 90% load in Chrome (stable), 99% in Chrome Canary (a tad bit smoother), 70% in Opera (less smooth) and 70% in Microsoft Edge (smoothest) on the Ezbook 3 pro.

Since I could tame all the background load, the scrolling now is fine and usable (decided to go with Canary), even with its exhaustive CPU utilization.

Every program seems to have its own scrolling implementation. Other Windows programs are far worse, they either can’t do pixel smooth scrolling, react sluggish or feel like walking over quicksand. It works nicely now in the newer Windows interface, Microsoft store, or settings, for example. But that’s it so far. Even the Windows standard programs like Device Manager, File Explorer , etc. don’t get the scrolling right. And common apps like Facebook, WhatsApp pretend to do smooth scrolling, but react extremely sluggish by modern standards.

[Author]

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