The deathly pace of keyboard evolution is actually a barrier to progress, according to HP vice president Phil McKinley, who I met last week. “The keyboard is still a hugely intimidating factor for users,” he told me, referring especially to users in developing countries who haven’t grown up with computers. “It still has a System Request and Break key on the keyboard. When was the last time you touched the Break key?” he asked.

I honestly can’t remember.  If I’m being truthful, I didn’t even know what it did until I just looked it up on Wikipedia. It is, apparently, a carry-over from the days of teletype machines, used (literally) to give operators a break from the noise of the clattering mechanism. Nowadays, the Break/Pause key is largely used to interrupt the flow of data pouring out of the BIOS. Does this indisputably niche feature still warrant its own key? Or could that precious keyboard real estate be put to better use?

HP’s clearly been giving it some thought. It showed us a hush-hush computer that I’m not allowed to talk about just yet, which replaces all the function keys (F1, F2 etc) with actual functions, such as volume up/down and screen brightness. The old function keys have been relegated to secondary status, only available when you hold down the Fn key first, which could be a pain in the rump if you’ve grown accustomed to refreshing your web browser with F5.

Lenovo’s been revamping its keyboards too. The company reportedly installed keystroke logging software on the PCs of 30 employees, and discovered that they were using the small Escape and Delete keys about 700 times each week. So the company’s decided to make both keys double size on its new keyboards, and is also considering doing away with the rarely-used CAPS LOCK key, which is bad news for The Sun headline writers and shouty teenagers on internet forums.

What other keys could be done away with? I personally never touch the Context Menu key (the one with the cursor and the drop down menu picture, normally found between the Ctrl and cursor keys) or the Windows key, but I’d be interested to hear your views. And what would you replace them with? You never know, we might actually have a PC Pro Keyboard by the end of this!

Some use several fingers simultaneously to work it, many others prod with fat single digits. The vast majority come bundled with PCs, and few people would ever consider spending more than pocket money on a new one. Few, but not zero.

We’ve seen Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus keyboard. It “justified” its extravagant price tag by placing a small OLED display behind each of the 113 keys. Specially programmed software is then able to change the picture on each of the 48 x 48 pixel displays. See it in action here. Perhaps you could change each key to a vomit pattern to disguise your reaction on seeing the $1,500 price tag.

This was then complemented by Art Lebedev’s 15-key Pultius number-pad. Just in case you felt you weren’t getting enough value from your investment.

Then in January US start-up United Keys signed a deal with Foxconn to bring the OLED technology to a range of gaming devices. This led to the launch of a keyboard for PC gaming, with a row of 12 customisable OLED buttons in place of the normal function keys. We didn’t know the price at the time of announcement, and a quick look at the website shows that… well… it doesn’t appear to have materialised. Surprising.

But I don’t know why either of them is bothering – there’s already a keyboard out there at a palatable price that puts the Maximus firmly in the shade. Stop what you’re doing, put your $1,500 back into savings, flex those fingers in anticipation…

Ladies and gentlemen, for the princely sum of £81 (from here) you can turn your keyboard into this:

Yes. It’s a face (at least I think it is). On your keyboard. In LEDs. Tell me a better use of £81 and I’ll call you a Dvorak-loving liar.

OK, that’s not the most flattering picture of the Luxeed LED keyboard. It does look a bit better in the pictures below, and I can see a small sliver of merit in being able to see the labels on your keys in the dark, but £81 is an awful lot to pay for the ability to paint your Tab key in magenta.

Admittedly the $1,500 keyboard was never a serious buy for consumers, but this one’s different in that it’s actually reasonably affordable. Yet the fact that it’s been kicking around in various places online for more than 18 months now and you’ve probably never seen one in the flesh – or even heard of it at all – suggests the market for such “luxuries” is pretty much non-existent outside of Luxiium’s Korean base.

A keyboard is a keyboard, and the vast majority of people just want one that works. Gamers are often willing to pay a little more for extras like shortcut buttons or an integrated screen for their ammo and health, but that actually gives them something useful for their money. Having your WASD keys in cyan may look pretty but it won’t make you strafe any faster.

Of course, if they really want the Luxeed keyboard to catch on there’s one simple solution: demonstrate a feature that’s genuinely useful in everyday life, a feature so good that we’ll see it and think “I must have that!”

Forget smily faces and rainbow effects – just put out a marketing image with the keys lit up in the shape of a comedy penis and they’ll sell to giggling Brits in their thousands.

I have a guilty secret; although I work o PC Pro, I’m actually a avid Mac ethusiast. I fact, I’ve bee called a fa-boy by some in the past.

They’re everythig I eed from a PC. After a day istalling bechmarks, swappig out hardware ad searchig for drivers, all I wat is a machie that works well ad ever eeds tikerig with. The gorgeous OS and chassis desigs are a ice bous, too.

I’ve ever had ay problems with my Apple laptops, eve though I treat them very badly. My iBook survived over two years of beig throw i a bag, kocked and bumped, picked up at oe corer and geerally treated as a everyday workhorse, before fially givig up because of a broke power adapter plug.

That’s why I’m disappoited that my MacBook has developed a slight fault after less tha half this time – the “” key has falle off, that’s the oe betwee “M” and “O” i the alphabet, and “B” and “M” on the QWERTY keyboard. Ufortunately, my “” key is i my pocket, istead.

I’ll be takig it i to the Mac store later this week to see what they ca do – hopefully I wo’t eed to leave it with them, or I’ll have to tidy up ad remove all my fiacial documets and photographs. I’ll keep you posted.

What I don’t like is what happens when some requester leaps up while I’m typing and steals focus from the window I was typing into.

It’s not just the sheer rudeness of the interruption, though that’s obnoxious enough. The big problem is that – well, call me bourgeois, but when I’m typing I sometimes like to hit the space bar between words. And I type fairly quickly, and I don’t always look at the screen as I’m doing so; and so, when a requester suddenly leaps to the fore, I frequently end up hitting the space bar before I’ve noticed it.

The requester, of course, knows nothing and cares less about what I was doing before it appeared. Thinking only of itself, it presumes that my pressing space must constitute carte blanche for it to launch immediately into whatever idiotic behaviour some dullard thought would make a good default action… and lo, my computer is away and there’s no telling what might happen.

It’s particularly annoying when it’s IE7 telling me a download has completed. Never mind that already, right at the start of the process, I clicked the button to run the application after downloading. Once it arrives, Internet Explorer interrupts me with a second requester asking the same question again – and, in flagrant disregard of the decision I have already indicated, the default option is ‘don’t run.’

And so, when, as is inevitable, I inadvertently ‘choose’ the default option, the requester simply closes. Cue a lengthy search of my hard disk for the installation file, which generally turns out to be in a hidden directory buried eight levels down from the root, with a forty character name that’s just a string of hex numbers.

Sometimes I think we should go back to QDOS. No multi-tasking, no directories. Just think of the productivity gains.