My desktop, an HP Pavilion H8-1214, typical of consumer class machines, came with a terrible keyboard. The system was purchased from Woot.com in July 2012. It was nicely specified and very good deal, so I simply replaced the supplied keyboard with something more appropriate.
Bouncing between substantially different keyboard layouts can be a source of irritation. In recent years most of my computers have been HP business class systems. I’ve made it a habit to keep a couple of spare keyboards on-hand. That way any system that arrived for my use could readily be mated to the keyboard that I’m most comfortable using.
When I was at Pixel Power it was not at all uncommon for systems to arrive without a keyboard or mouse. I’d just grab these from my local stash, which gave me the chance to use what I preferred in any case.
Perhaps consistency of keyboard is a picky little thing, but a considerable increase in productivity springs from such considerations.
These days I’m moving between the HP H8 desktop and the Lenovo X1 Carbon. The difference in keyboard layout that I noted initially is a small but constant annoyance. Since I can’t change the keyboard layout on the X1 Carbon I’ve been thinking about buying a matching Lenovo keyboard for the HP desktop.
This inclination was reinforced when I recently read that Lenovo was shipping their new Compact Bluetooth Keyboard. This keyboard is based upon the T431 laptop. Lenovo keyboards have a great reputation. My experience thus far with the X1 Carbon is that it’s well-earned.
They are offering both wired and wireless models, which is great as I have little interest in the Bluetooth variant. Nor do I care about the trackpoint and related buttons. On a desktop I’m going to use a mouse.
The trouble is the lack of a numeric keypad. That won’t be good, even if the the left side FN, CTRL, Window & ALT keys are exactly right.
Of course, all of the “normal” (ie non-compact) keyboards that Lenovo offers sport the exact same key layout as the HP keyboards that I have at present. They don’t make a keyboard that has the key layout of a laptop, but with the addition of the desktop standard numeric keypad and navigation keys.
As usual, I am the edge case. I always seem to want something that no-one has as yet seen fit to make.