Slashdot Mirror
Silent Keyboards for Silent PCs?
Kethinov asks: "Following up on the question asked in this story, I have a similar problem as he did except my late night coding (typing) sessions, not my clicking, seem to generating excess noise for the people I'm living with. I, as he did, checked out this possible solution, but to be honest, I can't type on anything but a standard-layout keyboard. Now, I too can search Google, but just looking at a possible solution doesn't help much. Does anyone on Slashdot have experience in this matter, from which I could better narrow my choices?"
IMHO there is no good "silent" keyboard. At the extreme end of silent you have membrane keyboards, but if you hit more than a few keys an hour you'll become frustrated at the poor usability. Most mushy keyboards make some noise, but are on the very low end of usability. Getting back to the first poster's recommendation of the Model M, that breed of keyboard is the one you want. Put your efforts and mone into soundproofing the computer room.
I recently replaced all model M keyboards at home (4 systems) to the newer IBM keyboards that come with netvistas. I was browsing around and found my favorite changed from the old model Ms to the newer IBMs and a few dell keyboards. The newer ones are nice and quite, but the problem stays. To find a truly good keyboard that is also quite is next to impossible. Ive seen the really quite types but I couldnt use them... the keys dont seem to bounce back so easily. Some of them had crappy plastic and was completely unusable.
This thread along with the previous silent mouse is pretty important to me. Beside bothering the crowd around, I feel model M types also bother me as I work. You can concentrate more on your work in complete silence.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
That's odd. How do you avoid hitting e.g. 'h' and 'b' when you press 'y'?
Just go to your local Best Buy/CompUSA and experiment with the keyboards they have out. You won't find a silent one, but some are much better than other. If you don't pound the keys, some standard keyboards are barely audible (my MS MultiMedia Keyboard is pretty quiet, although I don't recommend it because the F-keys are castrated).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
My problem with all the "quiet" keyboards I've seen is that the key's do not spring back to the fingers nearly as fast as a good old $15 piece of junk. I type over 90wpm when I'm not hurrying and this presents a problem for me. It's hard enough even finding a POS keyboard that responds quickly enough that I don't make typo's due to the keys not actuallying being there when my finger is.
Does anyone else have this problem? Has anyone found a silent AND responsive keyboard?