My new keyboard arrived!

Hur­ray! A new key­board! And I almost entirely like it! It has a few quirks that I don’t entirely enjoy, but over­all it is pretty good. Again, this is the Microsoft Ergonomic Key­board 4000.

Things I like:

• The black and sil­ver and very sharp look­ing. Even the “Do Not Remove — Safety Infor­ma­tion” tag is designed to blend in.
• Lots of cus­tomiz­able but­tons with generic labels.
• No spe­cial “Help” but­ton! I’m so glad a key­board man­u­fac­turer has finally real­ized that a help but­ton isn’t needed.
• There are 4 extra keys above the key­pad: “=”, “(“, ”)”, and “Backspace”.
• Key­board remem­bers that I want F Lock turned on! I HATE how key­board man­u­fac­tur­ers have decided that the func­tion keys should be replaced with stuff like “Undo” and “Close”.
• The hand rest is VERY com­fort­able. It’s made of some kind of foam mate­r­ial, and the reviews say it is very durable.
• Had the tra­di­tional 6-key.. umm.. thing above the arrow keys. None of this weird ver­ti­cal crap.

Things I don’t like:

• The Zoom but­ton is vir­tu­ally worth­less and not pro­gram­ma­ble. I’d rather have it set as a, well, pretty much any­thing else would be nice.
• Space bar is dif­fi­cult to press in upper cor­ners. Can be very annoy­ing depend­ing on your typ­ing style.
• Pro­gram­ma­ble but­tons are not lit, and the writ­ing on them is to mel­low to be eas­ily read in low-light conditions.

In sad­der news, my fam­i­lies router died today. Luck­ily we had a spare.