Top 3 frustrating keyboard features

Some keyboard features look great as they're winking out of the packaging, but turn out to be an unexpected source of pain in real life. Here are some of the top design flaws to avoid when buying a keyboard.

Bad key arrangement
This is one to watch out for when you're looking at a "slim", laptop or otherwise smaller than normal keyboard. Some canny rearrangement has to take place in order to fit all the keys into less space, but sometimes some less than canny decisions are made. Take this one, for example: placing the Home key next to a shorter than normal Backspace key. Your fingers are probably trained to use a full sized keyboard, which has a long Backspace that extends to the end of the main block of keys. You will therefore mistakenly hit whatever's next to Backspace from time to time on a smaller keyboard. That’s inevitable, and doesn’t matter, so long as the key you hit doesn’t do something really annoying. Such as put your cursor at the beginning of the line. Picture the scene. Typing along, you make an error, hit Backspace (or so you think), continue typing....Argh! The end of your sentence is now at the beginning! A smart choice for this position is Delete, because it won’t do much if you hit it whilst typing, but we’ve got a Belkin keyboard that instead put Home in here. Bad, bad move.

A Catastrophe Button
This one is a potential disaster that sits next to you all day like a little demon, and funnily enough we found it on the Bad-Home-key Belkin board. It’s an Off button. A Button that inexplicably has the power to switch off your PC with a single key press, bypassing the confirmation screen. I’ve been using the Belkin board for a while now and hadn’t actually noticed it until the other day, when I was INSTALLING WINDOWS 7. Yes. I accidentally pressed the Catastrophe Button and then watched in horror, helpless, as everything shut down. Fortunately the installation had just completed, and it was in the process of downloading and installing updates, so no harm was done. This time.

Non-button buttons
These look really cool when you first meet them, but turn out to be a pest in the long run. They are buttons that have no button: flat keyboard surface with a sensor underneath that detects the lightest, slightest touch. The flap of a sleeve or a bit of paper is enough to trigger them, which, thought the designers of one Microsoft board, would make them ideal as Function keys. They give the keyboard an unsettling air of being “live”, so sensitive that the merest contact spurs a flurry of activity. They’re Function keys, so all kinds of things start going on, and you often have to know what key does what in order to undo it. Annoying!

If you’ve found any others, shout out in the comments.