I just purchased a £30 ms ergonomic keyboard and yes, I will stand by the crack-pipe toss pots and say it is a better experience, it is.. honest!. However, why have a zoom button? Furthermore, PrtScn doesn’t work for love nor money.

I think some serious neglect in which much innovation is needed is in the hair magnetism department. What or what causes hair to miraculously appear under your keys? It is horrifying!

Good points made mate, I can’t agree with your more.

And wireless keyboards? I mean come on… are people tripping over this cable as it lies on their desk or something?
Give me a fucking break.

All I want is a good quality keyboard using the same layout that has been standard for years.
It just goes to show… the undiscerning consumer zombie sheep will buy whatever shit you put in front of them… just take away all the normal keyboards and people will HAVE to buy our shitty new designs.

I also replaced little green LEDs for lock keys with super-bright 5 mm LEDs of 3 different colors. Now i don’t have to look directly on them to know which are on and which are off - i can tell by color!

I’m a programmer but i still like the enter key to be L-shaped. On my keyboard the button for \ and | is between left shift and Z. Entering | is easy because shift is right next to it. It’s logic because backslash is to the left of the lower row, and forward slash is to the right.

It’s interesting to note that almost all the expensive, branded keyboards mess around with the standard layout and promise you something new and innovative, but the cheaper US$3 (yeah, Rs. 130) keyboards are actually perfectly standards compliant and work like a charm.

2 Shifts are requuired if you type a lot, other wise how would you enter a “!” with 1 hand.

The windows key and ‘Menu’ key on a modern keyboard are great when doing client support over the phone, then the muppets can click and press that button, for when saying, “Now let’s try clicking with the other button on the mouse over that file name.” isn’t plain English enough for them. but 99.99% of the time for personal use apart from the odd KEYB shortcut (I don’t mouse for the hell of it) it is a PITA.

Non standard insert blocks (ARRRGH) mine has the PRT|SCRL|PBRK keys on the top row and stupid power functions where they should be, I’ll just grab that window and *Poof* attempt Power down.

The Insert key is required, it is used to alter viewpoints in a lot of games and the insert block would then be called something different, and would look strange with 5 keys.

I had a tool ages ago that could link your num lock light to you HDD activity, unfortunately I use the numeric pad a lot, (I get to enter a lot of data) and that just got confuzzling

I had one KEYB that moved escape above the tab and moved the tick somewhere random, and put a propriety button that did crap all that I could find in it’s place, got used to the escape, but couldn’t stop my submarines engines and bring her straight and level without that key.

A good fungused keyboard is a big deterrent to unauthorised access. and I like cables the annoy the hell out of fems.

Scroll lock is application specific - the only use in windows know is in spreadsheets… for e.g. in Excel it locks the cursor position allowing you to scroll with the arrow keys and page down without losing your position. and in the linux terminal.

I use Pause in the windows Command Prompt to stop things flying by and in Games to go grab a drink.

I just wish the winKey would open the Menu in Linux… I have configured it to work that way but it should be standard.. and if the linux people dont wanna call in the winkey rename it to menukey or something.

The worst thing is the subtle layout differences (often regional diff)… more then once i’ve had to hunt down a key like the ‘/’ or single open quote on a friends keyboard.

and btw 2 Shift keys are gr8 for playing pinball.

And i like the MS natural keyboard… it grows on you the more you use it.

I like some of the keys that’s being criticized here.

Win + Pause / Break = “System properties”.

Caps lock is OK for 3D action games - if the small green LED is on then you’re running otherwise you’re walking.

Scroll lock keys are useful for MS Excel (obviously to scroll the sheet). It also employed in most hardware KVM (=Keyboard VGA Mouse) switches (”scroll lock then scroll lock then up/down arrow” will switch the keyboard, display and mouse to the next/previous PC)

The worst of all are non-standard layouts. For example the family next door have insert end delete keys on their keyboard merged together and marked as “delete”. Guys can you imagine that?

I press Ctrl+Ins - and the block of text disappears. Then I look at the screen. Then I say “Dammit!”. Then I realize all the friggin’ shit about the fuckin’ layout and press Ctrl+Z to undo. Then I’m tryin’ to find the real Insert key. And you know what? There’s the only Insert key on that keyboard - one on the numeric keypad! So just to copy a few words I have to press Num Lock, then press Ctrl+zero, then press Num Lock to restore it’s state. A few moments later I press Shift+ins to paste - and the fuckin’ text block dissapears again! Then I say “Fuck!” and begin to look at the keyboard before pressing a single key on it - which catastrophically slows down all the computer operations.

IMO americans should pass the law which obliges the keyboard manufacturers to do exhaustive clinical studies of ANY keyboard layout before putting the keyboards with this new layout to the production.