Keyboard Layouts

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QWERTY is not the final word on keyboard layouts!

The standard English QWERTY layout is very poorly designed.  When one looks at the letters in the 'Home Row' (A-S-D-F-J-K-L-;), it's probably not too hard to believe that less than one-third of your typing is going to take place on these keys.  This is significant, because these are the key that do not require you to move your fingers to strike them!  The result is that the English typing speed is significantly slower than it could be, if the keyboard had been organized to put the most-used keys on the Home Row.  This layout is purely an historical artifact, and was designed to conform to the needs of 1890's typewriter technology, which would often jam if two adjacent keys were struck rapidly in succession.

The best example of a keyboard that actually makes sense is probably the Turkish layout:

The language uses the Turkish Latin alphabet, and therefore requires its own dedicated keyboard.  The layout was developed in collaboration with the Turkish Language Institute with the goals of maximizing use of the Home Row, locating the other often-used keys in places that are anatomically easiest and fastest to strike, and evenly distributing the typing load between the left and right hands.  These design criteria have resulted in the most efficient keyboard layout to-date; the fastest Turkish typists regularly outpace the fastest typists in the rest of the world.

The English-language user has not been left out!  The Dvorak layout, named after inventor August Dvorak and commonly known as the American Simplified Layout (ASK), has sought to correct some of the issues with the standard English QWERTY layout.  The Home Row (A-O-E-U-H-T-N-S) actually makes sense, and maximum typing speed is increased.  The Dvorak layout is standard enough that it comes installed with most modern operating systems, so making the layout switch is fairly straightforward.  The downside?  You have to learn it, which takes time.  Websites like Dvorak Keyboard Training provide interactive practice to get you moving in the right direction.

What if you're learning another language?  You have several options: learning the obnoxious Unicode input codes, settling for 'ss' and 'ae' when you really mean ß and ä, or... changing your keyboard layout.  There are very many keyboard layouts currently available, so it's just a matter of figuring out exactly what you're looking for and changing some operating system settings (you do NOT need to buy a new keyboard!).

Take the standard German layout, for instance: it is based on the English QWERTY, but with Y and Z switched and quite a few changes to the locations of the symbols and other miscellaneous things.  It includes the German-specific characters (Ö-Ä-Ü-ß) and an increased number of dead keys (keys that change the function of the other keys, like SHIFT).  There are two dead keys for accented characters (á, ê, í); while these characters aren't actually used in Germany, a European German user is very likely to deal with Spanish, French, and other languages that do.  Not surprisingly, this layout comes standard with all operating systems, and making the layout switch to German is very straightforward.

...but I just said that QWERTY (or QWERTZ in this case) is slow!  Never fear; the Neo Users Group has created the German equivalent to the Dvorak layout.  This doesn't ship with most operating systems, but installation is pretty straightforward if you follow the directions on their website.  Can't read the website?  If you don't know German, why are you trying to install a modified German layout?!

Most modern operating systems allow for rapid switching between the different keyboard layouts that you have installed.  In Windows 7, for instance, you can rapidly switch between multiple input languages and keyboard layouts by clicking on the little icons that appear in the system taskbar:

Do you have any experience with alternative keyboard layouts?  Do you think keyboard layout makes a difference to typing speed?  Would you be willing to try a new layout?  Comment!

Laptop Overheating

My Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop has been getting slower and slower since I first purchased it new around three years ago.  I had assumed that this was due to the inevitable degradation of Windows Vista, but a fresh reinstall of Windows 7 didn't help.  When I burned myself on the bottom panel of the laptop, that was a pretty good indication that I should check for an overheating problem.

I installed I8kfanGUI, a handy little program for monitoring Dell Inspiron, Latitude, and Precision laptop temperatures, fan speeds, and CPU speeds and loads.  It allows you to manually control the speed of the laptop fan; I used this to max the fan speed, hoping to bring the processor core temperatures down to something reasonable.  Under high load, temperatures were still staying as high as 85C, and the laptop's performance was suffering as Windows automatically 'throttled' the processor speed to keep the temperatures from continuing to increase.

Time for more drastic measures.  Using this helpful guide to disassembling a Dell Inspiron laptop, I completely took the machine apart.  Inside: giant dust bunnies, completely clogging up the heatsinks at the end of the heatpipes that cool the CPU and GPU.  These could not have been removed simply by blowing some canned air through the external vents on the laptop; I had to use tweezers to dig out them out.  The fan was still spinning, but the air wasn't getting where it needed to go to keep things cool.

Success!  I reassembled everything, fired it up, and the load temperatures were down into the 60's.  Still pretty warm, but no CPU throttling and no performance loss.

Loss of computer performance over time is NOT normal.  If a fresh install of a stable operating system doesn't solve the problem, heat management may be the issue.  A computer is just like any other piece of machinery, and a little routine maintenance can make all the difference.  It can be a real pain to take a laptop apart and put it back together again, but an hour of effort can make it usable again.