Florida Backyard » keyboards

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog. Sir.

Stacy — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:41:19 +0000

My quest for the Perfect Keyboard is, at least around our house, the stuff of legend. I have tried them all, plus 97 others. I’ve gone through double digits on the backlit versions, before finally chucking it and just ceasing to work at night. The first backlit was great, beautiful scissor-key action, lovely color, but proved too fragile for everyday use. I notice they don’t seem to make them anymore, quel surprise.My last purchase was a Micro$oft wireless keyboard/mouse combo that I shall shortly be using to start a bonfire. Those bastards were a nightmare, let me tell you. First off, you couldn’t have the receiver too near anything metal. Or plastic. Or tall. Or short. Or made of cheese. The list goes on and on. Both the mouse and keyboard would spontaneously lose connection to the receiver…not at the same time, mind you, but completely at random. The keyboard had mountainous keys, each of which distinctly CLUNKed when you hit it. It was like listening to popcorn pop to use that thing. Hard plastic popcorn.

After an exhaustive search on my beloved Amazon, I found this beauty. Encouraged by the rave reviews, I took the plunge. It arrived about 20 minutes ago and I am already in love. Scissor-keys, very low profile (both keys and the entire board itself), and best of all, it’s just a keyboard…has all the standard bits but none of that extra zoom-y, alt-F type horseshit. It’s a pleasure to type on, and wouldn’t dream of giving you finger cramps, because even though it’s low-profile, it’s not small in width…it’s somewhat wider, even, than many keyboards I’ve had in the past, with standard size key tops.

So, if you’re looking for something with the same feel as your laptop keyboard, but not in a crazy-small size, this keyboard is your huckleberry.

Hardware Pig

Stacy — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 16:03:56 +0000

I used to do a great deal of work after dark, both coding and design. As a parent of two extremely bright, precocious, and emotionally manipulative children, I know cellularly the value of having the kids be unconscious for periods of time. And since the kids bedrooms are right across the hall from my work area, I was loathe to turn on a light during this working time. Ergo my intimate association with backlit and/or illuminated keyboards of many different stripes. And having spent (expletive deleted) of money on the various available options, I can authoritatively state that they’re all shite.The ION Illuminated keyboard is a bigger pile of shite than the rest, however. I bought this keyboard last year, and the backlight puked within 60 days or so. Contacted ThinkGeek, who kindly generated a return auth., but with this and that, it never got sent back. A few weeks ago, after spilling a good deal of coffee on my last keyboard (non-illuminated, kthx) and zorching it into oblivion, I pulled the ION back out of the box and started using it. I did not immediately connect that with the sudden onset of RAM issues… With 2GB of RAM, and a 3.2Ghz cpu, the tower would start howling upon startup. The tab swapping in Firefox was extremely slow, hell, even slow typing within form fields on site pages. That last should have been a clue, though, because once I replaced the keyboard last night, with a huge clunky M$ wireless special, my tower went back to its old quiet self, and not a single bloody thing is lagging, even with Photoshop, Thunderbird, Illustrator, and eight Firefox tabs open.

So, it’s possible just the fact the keyboard didn’t work correctly was the cause of the entire issue, and an ION keyboard that *does* work correctly causes no such RAM isses. Mine didn’t work correctly long enough for me to find out. **stares at ION**