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 home hospital beds are right across the hall from my work area, I was loathe to turn on a light during this working time as they need to rest and recover.
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**