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Article posted on Jan 13

$30 to repair a keyboard

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 13, 2009, 11:35 am

This weekend, the right arrow key in my Unicomp Customizer 104 keyboard (I have the original, now discontinued beige version, not that black version) stopped working. Now, with enough effort and cursing, I could probably disassemble the keyboard myself and figure out if I could fix it. But I emailed Unicomp, and they offer repairs for $30, so I'm going to let them do that.

$30 is a bit steep, but it's a $70 keyboard. I'm mostly annoyed by a failure in a keyboard design that is a direct descendant of the IBM Model M, the keyboard that cockroaches will be using a thousand years after the WWIII.

Funny enough: My non-clicky keyboard of choice? A $15 Microsoft keyboard. It feels good, it's quiet, its extra crap buttons don't get in the way, and most importantly, the insert/delete keys are in the proper positions. Many keyboards these days have removed Insert, and replaced it with a double-tall Delete, and/or the cluster is 2x3 buttons instead of 3x2. Barbarians. The weird part is these mutations are mostly on the "higher-end" keyboards, not the sub-$25 keyboards.

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