I've mentioned before about the Kensington Comfort Type keyboard, which I found to be extremely comfortable to work with, especially because of the unique key shapes. Well, as it happened there was some trouble in paradise.

It seems that the PS/2 connectors on our motherboard are either not the sturdiest on the planet, or they were getting tugged on more than they liked, because after a few months of use the keyboard plug would start falling out of the port thus causing it to stop responding. Well, at ten o'clock at night when you're trying to work on a project you don't have many options, so it was off to the local Walmart where I found a PS/2-to-USB converter. This little widget which would let me continue using the keyboard only instead plug it into the USB port, and even could connect a PS/2 mouse if I was interested, and ultimately cost less than a new keyboard.

I'm glad to say that it worked fairly well for over a year, though it did have some weird behaviour afterwards - you couldn't hold a key for longer than about two seconds (made text selection difficult), and you also couldn't very easily press multiple keys simultaneous (control-shift & cursors tend to make it forget what it was doing), but we could live with it.

This past week it started stopping to work altogether, only to kick in again if you wiggled the cord coming into the board itself - it was on its last legs. Finally, last night while I was working on a new PHP shopping cart program it decided it had enough of me and refused to start working again, so this morning I've swapped it with a rudimentary USB keyboard that should last a tad longer.