nearly a decade ago I discovered a bug in my keyboard and it made me so angry that I had to get into mechanical keyboards and making my own keyboards to avoid it.
I just discovered another keyboard with the same bug, and it's built into my laptop.
excuse me I need to scream and find the location of the nearest lake to drop it in now
to find out if your keyboard is Trash, do the following:
1. hold down shift
2. hold down M. the letter "M" should appear.
3. tap Y. the letter "Y" should appear.
4. release shift and M
5. if Y did not appear in step 3, destroy that keyboard immediately.
gamers and mechanical keyboard nerds like to talk about this as "n key rollover" and USB protocols and such but it's really just 3 key rollover.
if you can't type a common english word in all caps while being a little fast and sloppy with your typing, your keyboard is broken. you should exchange it for one that is not broken
technical shit: this is anti-ghosting. Keyboards without diodes have a matrix problem where holding multiple keys means it becomes impossible to determine what keys are pressed: to avoid incorrect keys being pressed, it just ignores both the incorrect and correct keypresses
the way you solve this is by either:
1. being clever with how your matrix works. this technically leaves anti-ghosting issues but you can at least limit how often they happen, and on one key combinations.
2. PUT FUCKING DIODES IN YOUR DESIGN YOU CHEAPASS PUNKS
the thing is, there's several keyboard designs where they are not clever with their matrixes.
Here's a fucking hint: modifier keys like ctrl, alt, shift, windows? they will commonly be pressed ALONG WITH letter keys. PUT THEM ON DIFFERENT COLUMNS YOU PUNKS
my whole deal is making BAD KEYBOARDS and even I am yelling at you for how bad this keyboard design is!
and it is shift that's the problem. If I do my keyboard test from above without shifting, I get "my" correctly.
do not get a dell latitude 7400 if you are planning to type on it
this is merely a fundamental problem with making keyboard matrixes and we've understood how to fix it basically since the first day we started making keyboard matrixes
diodes are about a cent each in bulk.
adding them to a keyboard increases the cost by about a dollar. it's required for them to work correctly, but apparently there's a large market for 1$ cheaper but broken keyboards
I grabbed my nearest Bad Keyboard. I paid 2$ for this keyboard and another 9.95$ for the stickers.
But it lets me type MY and my built in one can't.
maybe I'll find a small usb keyboard, disable the internal keyboard, and glue the new one over it
I'm sorry for everyone who just went and tested this and realized for the first time that their keyboard is a piece of shit
BTW my actual advice for keyboards is that everyone should buy a mechanical keyboard but buy the cheapest you can.
the difference in "key feel" doesn't matter to me, but the difference in IF THE KEY WORK OR NOT is huge. But that's basically fixed on every mechanical keyboard, even the ones in the 20-30$ range
and honestly the difference between a 30$ mechanical keyboard and a 300$ mechanical keyboard is not that huge, in my opinion.
but it's way bigger than the gap between a 15$ membrane keyboard and a 30$ bargin-bin mechanical
and if you like the 30$ mechanical maybe then try the 100$ mechanical.
it'll be nicer.
but only nicer. The difference between a membrane keyboard and a mechanical keyboard is that the mechanical keyboard will work. That's way more important than "nicer keyfeel" and "neat looking caps"
@foone this was... like 2017 or something