Saturday, February 13, 2010

Now Typing: Mechanically!

Vidit Bhargava
My membrane keyboard this Jan. encountered an accident with my coffee. It as you know was a very silent death of some keys of my Microsoft Keyboard. Now, I had a Pleomax also and a TVS Gold also. I chose Pleomax over the Gold for it being younger than gold and much more reliable. I never really enjoyed Pleomax actually, so this week I decided to have a look at the TVS keyboard, does it work even after 12 years?

Its a mechanical keyboard. Having several times the life of a membrane keyboard. Fine lets try using it now. When I took it out, the white was coated in a layer of off whitish yellow. I cleaned that with some Colin, not a big problem.

After cleaning, we tried it on our old PC (The keyboard had AT ports), It worked well. So the next hurdle was to get a new connector for the keyboard. We needed it go into a PS/2 port. Easy, I went to the market at a computer repair shop, asked for an AT-PS/2 connector and this is solved too. But how does it work? Is it still good? Was it worth to spend 50 bucks on a connector?

Even 12 years later, every key is in contact (touch wood), The only difference in the keys area is that the enter key is big and the "|" key is placed up beside the backspace. I still love its sound (reminds me of the typewriters.). Also the keyboard is Mechanical, my ideal choice for a keyboard.

But I can't deny it having a few problems. There's just a bit of a problem with the control key (Perhaps, I played a lot of DAVE in my childhood!), the space bar is a bit unstable at edges, and insert key doesn't work. Also I tend to make more errors in touch typing (this keyboard being larger than my last two.)

On the whole the experience of using the keyboard is awesome, I like my "Old" Keyboard. Its perhaps always good to have a change. A new TVS Gold still costs a bomb (Rs. 1350) but I'm content with only giving 50 for a at converter. Old is Gold!

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