Samsung NC10 Tips & Tweaks thread

Just a heads up for those who want two-finger scrolling. I am unsure whether this is possible through a Synaptics driver itself (I don't think so), but I found this and it works well:
http://code.google.com/p/two-finger-scroll/

Keep in mind you need to disable Pinch for it to work. I find it works pretty well, comparable to a macbook.

 

Cool!.. Thanks a ton for the link.

 

Yeah I never use pinch anyway, thanks!

 

I've read quite a few people with complaints about the touchpad. I got my hands on my second NC10 today and I understand why people complain. It needs some tweaks to be workable.

Here's what I do:

- control panel, mouse, maximize the pointer speed (if it's too fast at first you'll get used to it.)

- tab device settings, settings, scrolling, disable horizontal scrolling (this makes the touchpad larger)

- disable 'free run' scrolling over long distance. (not sure if I translated it right)

- disable 'chiral motion'

- Firefox, tools, options, advanced, enable smooth scrolling

- use Firefox because it offers better scrolling than IE or Chrome in my opinion.

- if wanted install two finger scrolling as posted by Hurikaane:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=323232&highlight=two+finger I don't use it I prefer the scroll bar.

 

Thanks Phil!

 

Thanks for this post Phil. It was annoying me after a while, but these tips should solve my problem!

 

I love this little app. It makes my NC10 stands out with two finger scroll and 3 fingers right click. No more click sound of the click bar.

 

A guide to reducing boottime and some other tweaks. Haven't tested it myself but looks good sofar.
http://www.sammynetbook.com/plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?5465.post

Enabling Cleartype Makes a small display more readable.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/step1.aspx

I've made this thread the main thread for tweaks. l'll move some other posts with tips and tweaks to this thread.

 

Does the NC10 use a different scroll pad? Every notebook/netbook I've used with a Synaptics pad supports tap zones. I never use the physical buttons, I always set it to tap the top right of the pad for a right click and tap the top left for a middle click. I wish they'd made the NC10 without the buttons and just enable tap zones by default. Also the scroll zone on the pad only scrolls if your finger starts there.

I don't have an NC10, I'm still using an Eee 701, but looking at replacing it with the NC10.

 

It uses/supports tap zones, but multi-touch is nicer.

 

Another goodie is using RocketDock in conjunction with hide taskbar. That way you have full screen real estate, combined with the functionality of a dock.

 

Nice one I'll try that. I am very kean on gaining some vertical pixels.

For those who did not know, F11 enables Full screen browsing in Firefox and it works great.

 

I haven't tried it on the NC10 yet, but on my desktop PC I use VirtuaWin (I'm not allowed to post the URL yet). It's a highly configurable, hotkeyed, lightweight, open source virtual desktop manager. It also supports multiple monitor setups, so it's perfectly suited for fanatics (like me!).

 

I tried RocketDock. It's nice but it does not add much imo. The autohide of the normal taskbar is nice though.

I'm trying to gain a couple of pixels in FF. I'd like to keep my tab info, but hide the classic menu (file, edit etc.). Does anyone know how I could do it?

Edit: Found it!
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=331931

Now the titlebar!

 

Does anyone know how to spin down the hard drive?

Like, I have movies on my flash drive. I want to play from that. How do I spin down the hard drive while the movie is playing?

 

In Control Panel > Energy settings you can choose when to power off harddrive. That's the only way I know of.

 

Windows is funny like that. Every now and then it needs to access the hard drive, for who knows what. It's not gonna spin down, unless it's in standby. On my desktop I used to set the main drive to spin down after 20 minutes. I've never even once heard the drive spin down. Not even with 4 gigs of memory in there and no page file. A secondary drive does spin down, but as soon as I start doing stuff, never needing anything on that drive, it spins up alright.

 

The best reason to use the dock is to clear space on the taskbar for app's, with the second reason for its always-on-top status that keeps my stuff handy. Although I guess some don't use the quick launch bar and already have the taskbar free.

 

what sort of performance hit does rocketdock cause on the little system?

 

In my experience: None.

You can put Rocketdock in performance mode (low footprint).

If you'd put Rocket in best graphics and your NC10 is running on max. battery you will notice something.

 

I was wondering if that little app for two finger scrolling would work on a Lenovo S10 as well?

And OT, but can these netbooks (i.e. S10 and NC10) handle stuff like CS and GTA or does it require tweaks? There are a couple of videos on YouTube with GTA on an NC10 and CS on the S10. Thanks in advance for the help.

 

If the S10 has a Synaptics touchpad it will probably work. It won't hurt to try.

 

See this thread about games on the NC10.

John

 

Wow, that was the equivalent of a treasure trove!

 

Then say so in that thread and give the OP some rep.

John

 

Already did that, Sir!! And I ordered my black NC-10 today, will have it by Monday morning. Boy oh boy am I excited! By the way I checked out the display model again and didn't seem to find the single mouse button as annoying. Think I'm starting to love it already

 

Hey can anyone tell me how to disable pinch function in order to enable two finger scrolling?

 

spur:
Control Panel -> Mouse -> Device Settings tab -> 'Settings...' button -> Pointer Motion -> Pinch.

Never had any success with two-finger scrolling myself...

 

Am I the only one bugged by the SD slot which leaves the end of the card sticking out? Both my Pocket PC and my girlfriend's Vaio hold the SD card almost entirely inside the slot (it pops out you push it inwards again) - which means you can leave the card in the slot all the time if you want to. With the NC10 I feel the card needs to be taken out whenever I'm carrying the netbook in a case or bag...

 

Is there a way to separate mouse sensitivity and touchpad sensitivity so they are independent of each other? When I use the mouse it's four notches from the left, but when I use the touchpad it is maximum. It is a hassle to change it every time I use my mouse and the touchpad.

 

+1 .......am wondering the same.

 

Problem is, on my machine once I reach " pointer motion" it shows nothing in the window. NOTHING !!!! Why would something like that happen? I can't disable pinch, great.

Do I need new drivers? Or an update maybe?

 

spur
Silly question, did you click on the "+" ?

 

I expected that

Yes I did, I know there are drop down menus in that window. The only one which wasn't working was the "pointer motion". The one below it i.e. sensitivity and the ones above it were working perfectly. Never mind though, I've managed to get it working.

 

markhedder / spur,
If you google for
mouse speed switcher
it'll turn up a shareware utility for swapping mouse settings.
I've not tried it, since I'd not spend money on it.
I'm wondering if one could use a registry tracking utility to extract two *.reg files which could then be used to switch settings - just not sure if that would require a system restart to activate the new settings, which would not be worth the trouble...

By the way, I'd like to recommend a great reference point for finding outstanding freeware: http://www.techsupportalert.com. There's no mouse speed utility, but I've found several superb items there, including excellent defrag, uninstaller and system info utilities.

 

Thanks robdean, that link is quite interesting. Checking it out right now. wo finger scroll works beautifully now.

 

I found a way to use different sensitivities with a mouse and touchpad using a logitech mouse.

Just download the Logitech Setpoint software. Set your mouse sensitivity with the Logitech Setpoint, set your touchpad sensitivity under the regular control panel/touchpad settings.

Then go to Start menu -> Run.. -> Msconfig -> Startup tab. Then disable KHALMNPR.EXE so the settings won't reset on startup and both sensitivities will remain independent of each other.

 

Do the logitech drivers interfere with two finger scroll and the synaptics drivers in general? Not feasible for me to use if they do interfere. Anyway thanks for the useful post.

 

no they don't

 

got my nc10 today and im playing with it for a couple of hours now, installing adobe reader, office etc. and I still have enough battery power left ... little awesome thing!
I tried that two-finger scroll program, works like it should - very good improvement imo!
two finger right-click combined with that is useless tho, as it often right clicks when you want to just scroll. I also turned off scroll acceleration and set the sensitivity to lowest (both in the twofinger scroll program).
ps: the nc10 looks kinda like my vaio's baby lol, both black with power button at the right
tomorrow I'll take it for the whole day to the uni in my lab, I'm eager to see how long it will last

 

I did three-finger right click because two finger right-click was useless for me. All 3 of my fingers just barely fit on my trackpad.

 

Any possible way to improve the NC10's video capability? or the overall performance?

I'm trying to play some HD videos and it lags from here and then even with all the tunning.

Btw, would putting a SSD improve the performance? Battery and speed? or sumthing.

 

Re-encode your videos to at least 1024x600 or even 840x480?

 

I'm very close to ordering the NC10 and this is what I'd be using it for mainly.
Watching videos for travel.
What resolution are your HD videos that are lagging?

 

I would guess h.264 720p/1080p, right? the cpu is probably too weak for that

 

anything below 720p seems to be fine.

However, I dont know if its becuz people forgot to put the quality but some .mkv files seems to lag a bit. To the point that the screen freeze but the audio continu then I get another screen...its skipping...

Perhaps there's a way to make the NC10 to play vitrually anything? Besides oversized 1080p videos? Since if the NC20 can do it, the nc10 could possibly do it with a few tweaks? Also, is it possible to enhance NC10's performance with an external something?

 

Most videos (youtube / rmvb / avi / mpg / mp4 / mov ) all playback seamlessly on my NC10. I did try to play some trailer that's 720p. The problem is it'll open larger than my resolution but as soon as I double click to set it full screen, all play fine.

It comes down to what kind of codec and OS you're using.
Mine is running Windows 7 with K-lite Mega Codec pack + Quicktime Alternative + CoreAVC Standard. The latter should be what you need for HD videos to playback smoothly.

It's pay-ware but it worth the $8. I choose standard since Atom isn't multi core and I dont need GPU supports (not implement yet even in Professional edition)

http://www.coreavc.com/

Note* to enable CoreAVC instead of FFDShow used in Mega Codec Pack for HD playback, go to its video decoder settings, click the Codecs entry in the list to the left, find the H.264 entry in the grid, and change it from "libavcodec" to "disabled".

With this you should be able to play almost all videos type smoothly.

 

HD video is CPU/GPU intensive & there's really no way around that. Doubling frame dimensions quadruples the pixel count, and you end up with a hell of a lot of data to crunch. Feeding that into an Atom CPU with no special GPU support is very optimistic indeed: however much you 'tweak' a Ford Ka you won't get Porsche performance out of it.

My NC10 gives superb results with regular-definition video in AVI, WMV, MOV formats etc. I'm not surprised there have been some issues with MKV as it's much less widely supported and I've frankly found it awkward to configure on any system - it's especially prone to sync issues.

To be clear - most movies and TV shows to be found on the net play really great on the NC10. Only high-definition files cause a problem,and anything you can find in HD will almost certainly be easier to find in regular definition. HD files are almost always clearly flagged as such.

BTW the MaxxPlayer Windows Media Player plug-in works wonders in improving the audio output from the NC10 speakers...

 

for those who dont want to use fullscreen mode for browsing:

this theme for firefox shrinks the toolbars/menu, so you have more screen real estate: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/3699

 

i uh.. don't undertand how to use two-finger lol.