Laptop Keyboards

When you realize it has been over THREE years since you last blogged and that it is definitely time to say goodbye to your oldest, dearest friend of 10+ years…

Toshiba Satellite

Goodbye, mi amor. You had the perfect keyboard and you were everything I ever wanted in a laptop.  I’m sorry, but Windows no longer supports Vista and the guy at the PC place says it would cost $900 to install all the hardware you’d need to run Windows 7 and even then, you might not last another 2 years. Your battery no longer holds any charge and it’s really frustrating losing so much unsaved work when my toddler trips over the cord or when you go into sleep mode. 

I replaced your DC port three times and your power supply cable twice. I never downloaded any games on you and I never installed anything besides Microsoft Word and Itunes to your 16 GB hard drive.  Thank you, Toshiba Satelite,  for allowing me to backup all my files onto those free SWAG thumb drives my husband brings home from his work conventions, it was really convenient.

I really did everything I could to prolong your life, but I couldn’t find your battery for sale on Ebay and a new battery wouldn’t fix your process freezes and lag which were beginning to get annoyingly frequent.  

Which brings me to the following rant regarding the purchase of my new laptop:

• There seems to be a disturbing trend that all laptop manufacturers are no longer including right and left click buttons beneath their touch pad mouse sensors.   They’re either built in or there is no mouse pad because it’s a touch screen. 

• All laptop manufacturers (or at least 95% of the models on display at Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics, Office Depot, PC World, and the local college bookstores) have done away with island-style keys and switched to a chiclet style keyboard. 

• Laptops with screens larger than 15 inches will invariably have a 10-key keyboard. This sometimes significantly offsets the mouse pad to the left.

• The UP/DOWN directional arrows are half sized or crammed into the space of 3 keys instead of 4.

•  Page Up, Page Down, Home, End are more commonly assigned as Function secondary keys instead of being independent keys.  I only found one other laptop, the HP Folio Elitebook 9740 (almost as old as my Toshiba) that has these keys placed vertically along the far right side.

• Lastly, I will really miss having the delete key in the top right corner.

I will use you, but I will never love you like the Toshiba.