Beware of the bilingual Canadian keyboard layout
Who’s the IDIOT screwing up Canadian laptops?!
A couple of years ago, it happened to me. I lost my ability to easily make capital letters or hit return. Backslashes haunted their space.
It wasn't because of an injury, a computer bug or a broken keyboard. It's because I got myself a brand new Toshiba laptop.
I was used to the shift and enter keys being a bit larger than they were in IBM's old keyboards. IBM used to care about us getting pinky exercise, and they understood the positive benefits of stretching:
During my entire computer usage experience, I'd used keyboards that put the left shift and enter keys within easy reach of the pinkies:
My new Toshiba laptop stuck with IBM's specs. Here's what it gave me:
The Toshiba didn't last long in my house. I traded it in for a Dell Vostro, with a normal keyboard. It was also favorable in other old-school vs. new-school ways: it had a matte LCD screen instead of a glossy one, a trackpad that worked, and could run Windows XP or Vista instead of just Vista. And it didn't come with as much extra software installed.
Now I'm starting to notice other friends who've been affected by this! Both my girlfriend and my roommate at the moment have these kinds of keyboards on their laptops. One of them has an HP and the other one has a Compaq, but they are the same laptop. Exactly the same.
This isn't just a problem in Canada. Most keyboard layouts around the world have this problem. Perhaps anti-American sentiment allowed the problem to spread here.
The best way to avoid getting one of these layouts is to try your laptop out in the store before buying it. And if you're buying your laptop online, somehow verify that it's not a bilingual Canadian layout. But you can never trust a picture attached to a laptop order.
If you're ordering online, you might as well buy your laptop from the United States and have somebody sent it to you across the border.
Of course, Apple would never implement a design blunder like this, so sticking to Macs should also keep you safe. They also have a totally different (and logical) means for typing special characters, so anybody who wants to type in French should, unfortunately, stick to Macs.
When IBM introduced their PC/XT keyboard pictured above, they got a lot of complaints from users trying to make the switch from their typewriters. This was their big chance to introduce the Simplified American Standard (aka "Dvorak") keyboard layout, but they kept QWERTY instead to aid in adoption of their computers by administrative staff all over the world.
"IBM made the <Shift> keys rather small, and even worse, placed an extra key (backslash and vertical bar) between "Z" and the left <Shift> key, causing touch typists fits when attempting to use the keyboard."
