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The past week has seen one of Amazon's big sales. I've been fairly good during it. I nearly got a 12TB hard drive (about a third of the price of my first 1GB one for 12,000 times the storage!) but it sold out before I decided to buy it.
Apart from an SD card, the only things I have bought are a couple of PC keyboards.
I've had a Cherry G80 for almost four years. This has high quality mechanical keys - 'Cherry MX Blue' - which click about half way down the keystroke to show that it's happened along with a noticeable tactile effect to say the same. If it weren't for a couple of things, I'd still be very happy with it.
The first is that the PC is in an alcove. A metal set of IKEA shelves has the PC, the printer, the scanner, and a shelf of 'stuff' (CD-ROMs and a big pile of paper relating to theatre shows seen and not yet mentioned anywhere), then an IKEA table has the monitor, screen, keyboard, mouse mat (although I have a trackpad, L uses a mouse) and more stuff.
The problemette is that although this (just) fits in the alcove, a full keyboard is slightly too wide. If it's in the right bit of the table for typing, the mouse mat is pushed so it's hanging off the right side. (Fortunately, it's got a plastic base so you can do that and have it work!) If you have the mouse mat more on the table, the left of the keyboard is a bit too far to the left.
The second is that we never found a good lighting solution for when it's dark but you don't want the main lights on.
So... get another mechanical keyboard but with backlighting!
I've had an alert for price drops on a Razer one - the last of theirs to use Cherry MX keys - and a year ago got one for a very good price.
Except that it wouldn't work on this PC. It would on JA's - my guess is that it's down to the current needed from the USB port and there's already quite a lot hanging off the USB ports on mine. So she has that one, not least as it's even wider than the Cherry thanks to an extra column of macro keys.
Fast forward to the past week. First to catch my eye was a 'ten keyless' (i.e. no numeric keypad) one. I see it's just gone out of stock, but the normal price was only £22 and the deal price was for about 75% of that. It's noisier than the Cherry and not quite as nice in feel, but once you ignore some of the silly programmed effects, the lighting is better than the Razer's and the size is perfect. Even at the full price, it would be excellent value and I'm getting some dampeners that should make it a bit quieter.
It was a good thing I ordered it first, because I probably wouldn't have ordered it had I ordered the second one first.
That has RGB lighting and is full width. Normally just over twice times the cost of the first, the deal was almost 50% off that. Well, that's a good price and I've survived having a full width keyboard. Plus having RGB lighting would allow various colours to be allocated to various keys (for one thing, it might enable me to learn vim properly!)
.. except that it's horrible, a keyboard for Teletubbies who don't care about how the keys feel. You literally cannot have keys that stay the same colour unless you run the Windows driver and when they do change, the effect is awful.
I like moving pretty coloured light patterns - at some point, I will successfully film the LED cube I've programmed - but not on a keyboard!
It's gone straight back to Amazon.
Apart from an SD card, the only things I have bought are a couple of PC keyboards.
I've had a Cherry G80 for almost four years. This has high quality mechanical keys - 'Cherry MX Blue' - which click about half way down the keystroke to show that it's happened along with a noticeable tactile effect to say the same. If it weren't for a couple of things, I'd still be very happy with it.
The first is that the PC is in an alcove. A metal set of IKEA shelves has the PC, the printer, the scanner, and a shelf of 'stuff' (CD-ROMs and a big pile of paper relating to theatre shows seen and not yet mentioned anywhere), then an IKEA table has the monitor, screen, keyboard, mouse mat (although I have a trackpad, L uses a mouse) and more stuff.
The problemette is that although this (just) fits in the alcove, a full keyboard is slightly too wide. If it's in the right bit of the table for typing, the mouse mat is pushed so it's hanging off the right side. (Fortunately, it's got a plastic base so you can do that and have it work!) If you have the mouse mat more on the table, the left of the keyboard is a bit too far to the left.
The second is that we never found a good lighting solution for when it's dark but you don't want the main lights on.
So... get another mechanical keyboard but with backlighting!
I've had an alert for price drops on a Razer one - the last of theirs to use Cherry MX keys - and a year ago got one for a very good price.
Except that it wouldn't work on this PC. It would on JA's - my guess is that it's down to the current needed from the USB port and there's already quite a lot hanging off the USB ports on mine. So she has that one, not least as it's even wider than the Cherry thanks to an extra column of macro keys.
Fast forward to the past week. First to catch my eye was a 'ten keyless' (i.e. no numeric keypad) one. I see it's just gone out of stock, but the normal price was only £22 and the deal price was for about 75% of that. It's noisier than the Cherry and not quite as nice in feel, but once you ignore some of the silly programmed effects, the lighting is better than the Razer's and the size is perfect. Even at the full price, it would be excellent value and I'm getting some dampeners that should make it a bit quieter.
It was a good thing I ordered it first, because I probably wouldn't have ordered it had I ordered the second one first.
That has RGB lighting and is full width. Normally just over twice times the cost of the first, the deal was almost 50% off that. Well, that's a good price and I've survived having a full width keyboard. Plus having RGB lighting would allow various colours to be allocated to various keys (for one thing, it might enable me to learn vim properly!)
.. except that it's horrible, a keyboard for Teletubbies who don't care about how the keys feel. You literally cannot have keys that stay the same colour unless you run the Windows driver and when they do change, the effect is awful.
I like moving pretty coloured light patterns - at some point, I will successfully film the LED cube I've programmed - but not on a keyboard!
It's gone straight back to Amazon.