Keyboards, Had Enough, Popped my Cherry.

If that title doesn't sound like a delicious pun to you, and instead sounds dirty, A: get your mind out of the gutter, freak, and B: you clearly don't keep up with computer stuff in the neurotic way I do.

Here's some simple backstory. About 6-8 months ago, my old cheapo $20 Microsoft rubber dome keyboard died. I decided I wanted something all pretty and backlit, so I bought the Razer Lycosa Mirror. Now theoretically, all their issues (supposedly hardware issues from a bad production run) had been fixed and recalled, so the one I bought should have been fine.

So, within a couple of days, my fancy keyboard is spastically attacking me by loading a new instance of Windows Media Player roughly every 7 seconds, relegating whatever window I happened to be looking at to the background, and generally being a pain in the ass until I hard rebooted or unplugged the keyboard. Funny thing, my media player set up via the Razer software was iTunes.

I contacted Razer support. They told me "Oh, that's a hardware issue, initiate RMA." Well, it didn't seem much like a hardware issue to me, because it was easily fixed by forcing the drivers to reload, and would randomly occur at another time, whether 5 seconds or 2 days. So, I contacted them again, and told them it felt like software. After quite a bit of insanity, I managed to convince them their Lycosa software was broken, as evidenced by the fact that uninstalling it and running off of generic drivers fixed 100% of my hardware problems.

So, as the weeks go on, they keep contacting me, asking me for more information, since I'm clearly more competent than their QA/QC group, and eventually the software is actually reasonably safe to use. Of course, by this time, my audio and USB passthroughs in the keyboard had died, but hey, I'm a real geek, those are gimmicks I don't need or care about much, I get better signal quality when I'm plugged straight in anyway.

So, last night rolls around. My not so cheap keyboard, theoretically good for half a quadrillion keystrokes or some such, decides that it's time to go on strike. Specifically, my spacebar. Since I do occasionally type more than URLs, this seemed rather inconvenient. A look at the key showed me that the rather cheaply designed (read: piece of shit) spring wasn't going to function again. The little retaining clips that made the stupid thing stay attached were made out of the same plastic as those little green army men I used to play with, except less of it.

Well, that was the final straw. Something about owning an $80 "gaming" keyboard for less than a year and having more headaches than the morning after an Alcoholics Anonymous class reunion with an open bar just kind of pissed me off. So, when I drove down to my friendly neighborhood Fry's, I wasn't looking at anything Razer, and avoided all the rubber domes. I'm now fighting to get my hands retrained to work with my SteelSeries 6GV2, which uses nice mechanical Cherry Black switches.

I already love it, the return to an old-school feeling keyboard is like a slice of nostalgia that doesn't come with drawbacks like 8 bit sound and 640x480 max resolution. Granted, I'm having a few more typos than usual, but that will change soon enough.

Of course, you can't expect Razer to make a keyboard this solid. If they did, they'd be putting a perfect blunt object into the hands of the people with the most cause to want them dead: their customers. So, Razer, go soak your heads until you figure out that quality control means more than keeping half your stock in a warehouse to be able to handle the flood of RMA requests.