Thread: New keyboard does wonders

Originally Posted by cyberfish

Flux-capacitor? What's that.

DeLorean time machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1.21 GIGAWATTS!

Those spring loaded keyboards were so nice back in the day. Now they just rely on some plastic mat under the keys for the spring tension and it's not as nice.

But I'm afraid you will experience a degradation in quality sometime later. Especially of the spacebar key

The spacebar on my keyboard is definitely the noisiest key right out of the box but the rest of the keyboard is quite nice. A couple of early gripes:

• The keyboard tries to do too much and obfuscates the normal function of it - IE function keys don't work as expected until the F lock key is pressed.
• It appears that good old CTRL INSERT does not copy text. It forces you to use CTRL C and CTRL V. SHIFT INSERT still pastes which is a bit odd since the other combo doesn't seem to copy to the clipboard.

The best thing about it though is the size. It is a perfect fit for my hands and fingers and I rarely, if ever, miss a key or hit between two keys as I did on my other one. Another nice feature is they didn't try to be slick about the insert,delete,home,end,pgup,pgdn arrangement and just went with the standard horizontal equal sized keys layout. So many keyboard manuf. try to get all fancy with this part of the keyboard and all they end up doing is making a mess of it. If it's worked for so many years...please don't change the design of it.
I would give the keyboard an 8.5/10 rating which is pretty good in my book.

Originally Posted by Bubba

Those spring loaded keyboards were so nice back in the day. Now they just rely on some plastic mat under the keys for the spring tension and it's not as nice.

Is that what it is/was? Springs? Cyberfish's keyboard is a hot one! I'm sure I know of a stash pile of them somewhere -- but I also know almost for certain the people "in charge" of that stash pile probably threw them out as garbage and are stuck using something equivalent to same cheapass MS* curved ergonomic thing I am now, that comparatively speeking feels like it's made of SLUSH.

*this one has a "DARKSTAR" sticker over the logo

Originally Posted by kermit

I thought it was a Retro Encabulator. Or was that the Turbo Encabulator?

Originally Posted by Bubba

The keyboard tries to do too much and obfuscates the normal function of it - IE function keys don't work as expected until the F lock key is pressed.

Yeah. The (F)Lock function put me off too. Thankfully I don't care for the other functions in the F keys group. So I just keep the (F)Lock key On all the time. It will remember your last setting when you turn the computer off.

It appears that good old CTRL INSERT does not copy text. It forces you to use CTRL C and CTRL V. SHIFT INSERT still pastes which is a bit odd since the other combo doesn't seem to copy to the clipboard.

Hmm... and I thought I was the only one still using that!

It does Bubba. The problem is the damn applications that sometimes don't support it for some reason. Where did you try it? I'm afraid you are going to tell me you did it on the old keyboard on that same application. But I can assure you I can copy/paste with CTRL/SHIFT+INSERT.

If that is the case, the only two things that occur to me is for you to do an upgrade to the drivers first (assuming, you did install the drivers). They did an update not so long ago. Just get them from Software Download

The other one is to go to "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Ease of Access Center\Make the keyboard easier to use" and turn off all those damned things. But I suspect this has nothing to do with it.

The best thing about it though is the size. It is a perfect fit for my hands and fingers and I rarely, if ever, miss a key or hit between two keys as I did on my other one. Another nice feature is they didn't try to be slick about the insert,delete,home,end,pgup,pgdn arrangement and just went with the standard horizontal equal sized keys layout.

My words exactly.