Change Aspire E11 Win 8.1 touch pad settings and improve overall system performance

After reading many community posts over the past week or so, I would venture to say that a great majority of new Acer Aspire owners who end up returning the product out of frustration do so because of one (or both) of the following reasons; either they perceived the computer to be too slow or thought the touch pad was defective. Both of these issues can be corrected. Here is what I did on an Aspire E11 ES1-111M-C7DE running on Windows 8.1:

Touch Pad – the default setting is for Precision Touchpad which will very sensitive if you inadvertently brush up against the touchpad while typing. Like many people, I don't like it. To change the default, go to the top right corner of the desktop screen to access “Settings”, then select “Change PC Settings”, then choose “Mouse and touchpad”. Scroll to the bottom of that screen and you will see the following message displayed:

“To help prevent the cursor from accidentally moving while you type, turn off taps or change the delay before taps works..” Just change the setting on this to “Turn off taps”. That will resolve the inadvertent cursor movement issue. Then if you prefer using a mouse instead of the touchpad, you can hold down the Function [Fn] key and press the [F7] key on the keyboard to turn off the touchpad function You can do the same thing to toggle between enable/disable.

Slow Overall System Performance – even though it seems your Aspire is underpowered or RAM-starved, you can still experience pretty snappy performance by maintaining it, keeping junkware off the system, minimizing start-up programs, running a basic virus and registry cleanup programs periodically. Here is what I did.

1. Remove unnecessary programs from automatically starting when you first boot up the system. To do so, go to the top right corner of the desktop screen to Search icon, then enter “msconfig” and hit Enter key. A “System Configuration” window will pop up. Go the Start Up tab and look at the list of all programs. I only allow the Realtek Audio and Intel-related programs to auto-start. All other programs like Adobe Reader, Dropbox and others I turned off. Making these changes will do a lot to speed things up.

2. I installed highly-rated AVG 2015 Free version from CNET www.downloads.com site. You may want to opt-out of the all the extra things AVG offers while downloading. Free versions of AVG or Avast will work very well.

3. I installed another highly rated free program from CNET's www.downloads.com site called Wise Registry Cleaner. Run each tab (Registry Cleaner, System Tuneup and Registry Defrag).

4. Also, realize that a $200 netbook will always have limitations compared to a $1000 laptop. For instance, very multimedia-intensive websites that use a lot of Adobe Flash windows (like USA Today, etc.) load very slowly. You may want to disable Flash plug-in from running in your web browser. Then when it tries to load a Flash video, it will prompt you to opt-in one time to view whatever video(s) are there on that particular site. I've done this before since I only am interested in seeing about 10% of all video content that wants to pop up. But sometimes, those websites can bring things to a screeching halt where only a reboot will work. Did I mentioned managing expectations

This is the second Aspire netbook that I've owned and they've worked well for me. And these are some of the steps that I took to get the best performance out of them. Hope all this helps.