02-23-2003, 07:16 PM -
I have one of those extended keyboards, but I wouldn't recommend mine to anyone. It's anMCK-800 from Orteck Technologies (don't worry, I hadn't heard of them, either) and it was cheap ($15), so I got it. It requires a driver to be loaded, as I assume most do, and mine takes the form of a system tray icon that can't be hidden (system tray clutter is a pet peeve of mine). Most of the buttons can't be reprogrammed. The play/pause/etc buttons only work with the standard windows CD player. It has a light that comes on when you have new email, but the driver for that (yet another unhidable system tray icon) never has worked. The buttons are labeled with text, so the three buttons that ARE reprogrammable are counter-intuitive unless they launch my web browser, calculator, and FTP client. And to top off my list of rants, there is no driver for WinXP. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to program my own driver for it, then I can repaint the buttons. But really, I think my time that I would have to invest into a project like that is worth more than the cost of a new keyboard. I'd be interested if anyone has found a really good one, too.