Friday 14 January 2011

Keyboard not detected. Press F1 to continue

I don't moan all the time.

Once in a while someone goes out of their way to be helpful, or technology works the way it should or I find something which is useful / good value.

Today I bought a new keyboard.

Like many computer people I know, I've had the same PC for the last 15 years or so. In that time the motherboard has been replaced a few times, disk drives have come and gone, graphics cards and monitrs have been swapped. But the oldest component was an HP keyboard which has been putting in sterling service for the last 8 years.

So while I was in PCWorld/Curry's today, I picked up a Sandstrøm keyboard for £15. This has the nicest action of any keyborad around this price I'd seen, and has the added bonus that the keys have LED illumination.

The reason I was in Curry's was to pick up a simlarly branded HiFi for my daughter's birthday. Again which I thought good value.

Despite the scandinavian looking name, not surprisingly both are made in China, and although time will tell regarding the quality of the electronices, both seem to be reasonably solid construction.

I suspect that the manufacturer / importer / retailler are currently discounting heavily to establish the brand in the UK.

Getting all the keys to work on my home machine (currently still with Fedora 9 - a Linux distribution) was surprisingly easy (most of the extra weeks worked as soon as it was plugged in anyway).

It does have a somewhat compressed physical layout (the space bar is only 60mm) so I'm still hitting thEWRONG Kets some if the time but I@m sure that will pass/