Or "Tiles 'r Us".

Ceramics 2 Go

Well!

The machine went back to John Lewis today. Full refund. I'm now using my old Vista laptop that the dead Sony Vaio replaced.

The touchscreen was great even in desktop mode which I ended up using for normal use, such as coming here, browsing and email. Browsing using "Win 8 Start Screen" mode is however dreadful, unless I missed a trick. The lack of tabbed browsing wrecks the whole experience, as dragging down the top of the screen to see other open pages litereally is a drag. Far too cumbersome. Fractionally better than multiple screens on Galaxy SIII browsing but not much.

(Now someone will tell me I didn't have to have IE10 full screen in that mode and I shall curse if it's true ).

I could have lived reasonably happy with all that.

But! The HP 1202ea, and nearly every HP machine on display at JL is a mess so far as I'm concerned.

The killer drawback is the positioning and general nastiness of the touchpad and its integrated buttons. The buttons appear to have multi-function depending where you click them, and half the time do nothing anyway. Right-clicking went badly wrong very often, so that I opened links in the current tab rather than a new one. Hitting the backspace in small amounts of text frequently even took me out and closed the tab! Incredible.

The touchpad is well offset to the right of the centre of the keyboard and spacebar. I found, (not being a touch-typist), I could be typing away like this then look up and find the curser nowhere obvious, (that's the good case!), or somewhere amongst earlier typing so that everything had become garbage. (No rude comments thank you ).

I concluded that the ball of my thumb, or shirt cuffs, or whatever, were causing cursor movement. Tilting the whole machine by mounting it on a MS laptop cooling stand I got a few years ago helped to some extent, but not sufficiently. It also increased the "bounciness" of the screen when using the touch facility to click links, so the tap often needed repeating even more than in unmounted mode.

Holding my wrists high to guarantee no contact stopped the problem but was not an acceptable solution.

There seemed in other circumstances also to be too close coordination of touchscreen and touchpad actions. In particular, unless I got confused, disabling touch-clicking which I hoped might fix it also disabled screen tapping. Maybe I did get confused. Too late now.

The question is what, if anything, to get now? Some good touchscreen kit due in June, so I shall probably wait. I keep reaching to tap/scroll this darn screen [chuckle].