Y and Y keys interchanged

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA what a waste

It's free, so no money wasted. It's incredibly unobtrusive, which I like. It's so odd for Microsoft to have such an invisible program. It does from time to time detect something, which is good, because other than that, you are unaware of it's presence. There's no discernable performance hit. It does have one drawback; at times it wants you to have automatic updates enabled, which I don't like; there's no telling what MS will do with it's updates.

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I am of course aware of the existence of cheap keyboards, but as I stated several times but apparently went unread, I don't like the feel of mushy keyboards, and all the cheap keyboards are the mushy feel kind with the rubber membrane keyswitches. They not only feel bad, they increase my error rate dramatically. I would expect some of the ink on most of them to wear off in a matter of days as well. Spending ten bucks on a keyboard that I will hate that increases my typing error rate would be stupid.

The newer kind of scissor switch keyboards sounded promising but from in store testing they aren't anywhere near as good as IBM Model M buckling spring keyswitches or Alps mechanical keyswitches. I don't believe I've tried a Cherry mechanical keyswitch keyboard.

Happy Holidays SuezanneC!

Unicomp owns the Model M design now and sells them. $69 for the buckling spring models.

http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/keyboards.html

EDIT: Their Customizer 104/105 model would probably be the one you want.

Happy Holidays to you too. It's doing a classic "Be gray and rain all day" thing here, as one might expect on a paid day off from work.

Thanks for the Unitech link. I knew someone bought the buckling spring tech, I've almost certainly visited the Unitech site before, but I can't remember everything. There's so much stuff on the internet it's hard to keep up with it all. The one I have is perhaps a bit too hard to push, but it's old, a new one might be just right.

That means the model that Desmond pointed out uses some other keyswitch system. The DasKeyboard site mentioned that they have gold plated contacts but in my brief scan of the site I didn't see anything more specific.

I do think it's time to act with regard to the missing ink on the keys. When you lose enough of them you can't fake it by looking at their neighbor.

I wish the Strongman site actually sold keyboards instead of just being a manufacturer's site.

One possibly I've wanted to try for ages is to get a left handed keyboard. They are available with mechanical keyswitches, and it would be nice to have the mousepad closer to the home row. The numeric keypad on the left might suit me ok.

Another keyboard related though is to buy a "splits in two" keyboard, one that you could split apart and put half of on either side of a graphics tablet. The idea there would be to get the graphics tablet in prime position so as to encourage the use of it.

In my real world there is this odd corporate entity known as "Costco" which for inexplicable reasons offers gigantic blocks of AA batteries at ridiculously low prices.

Now, I'd never understood prior, what anyone would do with say, 48 batteries at once. Until now...

I hate mousie tails.

But with a cord, when you knock the mouse off the desk you can pull it back up without having to move.

I've never had a wireless mouse, but I assume that it would find it's way to wherever it is in the couch that remote controls go to live.

I know I would at least have to go get it off the kitchen counter every so often.

I actually preferred hard wired until I bought a new lcd tv and my 8800GT vid card. Now I switch back and forth between the monitor and tv but of course quickly ran into a problem.........
Wireless only had a reliable reach of about 5 feet max. Walmart had a $60 bluetooth(50 ft range)keyboard/mouse combo and I have been using it ever since. Now I can relax in my easy chair and surf or script in style.

Imnotgoing Sideways might have worn the ink off of the <> ^^ keys.

I thought this would be more your style:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/02/steampunk_keybo.html

Editted to add the page that shows the monitor and mouse to go with that keyboard.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/06/steampunk_lcd_monitor_mod.html