Angry Internet Guy: Buttons, buttons, everywhere!

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Buttons, buttons, everywhere!

The PC keyboard is, of course, the single most important piece of equipment in your entire rig. The BackSpace key allows us to erase our mistakes, the Tab key allows us to more easily skip through large website forms so that we can inadvertently sign ourselves up for more spam, and the [CTRL-ALT-DEL] combination allows us to make right what Bill Gates made wrong (except, of course, that it no longer actually reboots the computer, so when Windows "really" freezes, this no longer does us any good.)

There are 26 letters in the English language. Add to that number the 10 number keys, the 17 various Shift-type buttons (including ESC and duplicate Shift, CTRL, and ALT keys), and the 10 punctuation keys, and we have 63 keys. I'll even be generous and allow for the numerical pad's 17 buttons and the 12 Function keys that nobody actually knows what they do anymore, and you've got a grand total of 92 keys. Incidentally, that's already four more keys than a grand piano.

Here's the problem. In an effort to be slightly more impressive than their competitors, keyboard manufacturers have started inventing keys. It all goes back to the [PrintScreen] key which never actually printed the screen in any version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Instead, it takes a screenshot of the screen and holds it in memory where it is completely useless without third-party software. (Yes, you can paste it into the included Microsoft Paint, but why bother with such a useless program?) This key doubles as the System Requirements [SysRq] button, which as you might have guessed, immediately and quite magnificently fails to show you any of your system requirements whatsoever. There's also the [Scroll Lock] button which, once again, as the name suggests, completely doesn't stop you from scrolling at all.

Moving right along, we now come to the Pause button which doesn't pause anything, and the Break button which doesn't cause anything to break (although it does have the same chance of randomly crashing Windows as any of the other keys.)

Now we get to the good ones. The completely made-up keys that don't have anything to do with anything. I'm looking at a keyboard with 19 freaking keys that are only slightly programmable within the limitations of the required driver software. There is a Browser back, Browser forward, Stop, Refresh, Search, Open Folders, Home, Email, Mute, Sleep (which I just accidentally pushed while counting these annoying keys), volume up, volume down, play/pause, stop, previous track, next track, some button with a picture of a CD and a music note on it which I have no idea what the hell it is supposed to do, another button with a picture of a computer on it which again, I have no idea what it's supposed to do, and a calculator button.

Every one of these commands can be executed quite easily with either a single mouse click or a single hotkey combination such as [CTRL-ALT-I] to open "Internet" in your favorite browser. Maybe I'm old-school, but I like keyboard shortcuts. Granted, I've been using a computer since the pre-Commodore 64 days when you had to save your data to an actual cassette tape (yes, like the ones they put music on), and had to type everything. There was no such thing as Windows, or even a mouse for that matter. (Without Windows, there was nothing to point to or click on...) Still, I prefer the familiarity of the keyboard, and love the speed and accuracy with which I can execute commands. It is far better than a mouse for this sort of thing, as the keys are always in the same place, and they're easily accessible to me. I use [ALT-TAB] to switch between windows, despite having a mouse buttons designed specifically for that function. Why? It's easier, or at the very least, faster.

I don't need (and more to the point, I don't WANT) all of these extra buttons on my keyboard. They're nothing more than a nuisance, and they get inadvertently bumped when I don't want them to be bumped. "What's that you say? Just buy an older 101-key keyboard?" No dice. I went to Best Buy recently to purchase a new keyboard after mine finally died, and was irritated, though not actually surprised, to find that every keyboard they had on the shelf had all sorts of fancy lazy-man on it that I didn't want. Needless to say, the price for these "high end" keyboards reflected the value-added features that the manufacturers were so kind as to provide against my will.

I want to buy a basic keyboard, and if someone ever opens ComputerStuffForOldFarts.com, I'll be the first customer.

Angry Internet Guy says, "Stop putting those unnecessary buttons on my keyboard. I don't come to your house and put 17 extra flush handles on your toilet!"