You may wonder why anyone would want to spend money buying an extra keyboard. It seems strange when new PCs generally come with what look like a perfectly decent keyboards.

The answer is that, in some circumstances, keyboards are health hazards. They can inflict pain and, in extreme cases, cause long-term physical damage.

But buying a new ergonomic keyboard isn’t straightforward.

Keyboards can hurt you

Typing injuries were called RSI (repetitive strain injuries) but are now generally described as occupational overuse syndrome or OOS.

Some people believe the business is just a worker compensation rort, but there’s plenty of evidence that keyboard OOS injuries are real. They affects thousands of Australians and New Zealanders every year.

In medical terms the pains might be tendonitis or tenosynovitis.

Both start mildly, with plenty of early warning signs. However, things can quickly turn nasty. In severe cases you could end up with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS), a squeezing of the median nerve as it runs into hand.

If you reach this point, you won’t be capable of typing.

Some poorly designed keyboards are particularly bad because they cause wrists to twist unnaturally. Of course posture, desk and seating height are important – possibly more important than keyboard design  – it might pay to look at adjusting these before investing in an ergonomic keyboard.

Is your mouse worse?

Ergonomics experts warn PC mice can cause more problems than keyboards. If you do a lot of typing, it’s a good idea to learn keyboard short cuts to cut down on mouse use.

New computers usually come with a traditional ’straight’ keyboard. Some manufacturers might describe these as ergonomic, but generally the term is for keyboards that better accommodate the human body.

One ergonomic improvement is to split the conventional keyboard down the middle and then angle the two halves outward. This is particularly helpful for people with broad shoulders as it enables them to hold their wrists at a more comfortable angle.

People with narrow shoulders often find a straight keyboard is preferable. Most split keyboards come with a fixed angle, but some are adjustable and others can even be broken apart.

Another improvement is to have a raised area in front of the keys where you can rest the heels of the palms of your hands. Many laptops are designed this way – it’s better than early designs where the keys started at the front of the case. It is possible to buy separate wrist rests; they come in a variety of designs including rubberised material and gel-filled rests.

Other physical designs include specially recessed keys and giving each key more or less travel – that is the distance that it moves up and down. Some people prefer more travel and audible ‘click’; others are comfortable with silence and a softer touch.

A keyboard with the wrong kind of response will affect your productivity.

Spacing is important

Make sure that the size and spacing of keys is right for the size of your hands.

If you have small hands then smaller keys, bunched fairly closely together will be more comfortable. Some people like small keyboards because they use up less desk space – but it isn’t wise to work in cramped conditions.

Netbooks and laptops are a problem. It may pay to add an external keyboard to these computers when working at home.

Beyond QWERTY

There are keyboards that abandon the familiar QWERTY pattern altogether:

• The Dvorak pattern, which claims to be more efficient and therefore less painful.
• Chording keyboards allow you to use key combinations to create letters. Since your fingers stay on the same keys all the time there’s less chance of RSI.

The problem with both is that you’ll need to relearn your typing skills and you’ll experience difficulty if you ever work at another computer.

The trouble might not be the keyboard but its place on your desk. Generally it should be set slightly lower than the average desk height. Some workplaces use keyboard trays that sit slightly below the desk. The best ones are height adjustable. Most desk trays also allow you to adjust the slope of the keyboard – counter-intuitively experts recommend that if the keyboard slopes at all, it should slope backwards.

Other keyboard trays are detachable and can rest on your lap. A smart alternative is to use a cordless keyboard on your lap.

Watch out for wireless keyboards and mice

People typically have far more trouble with cordless devices than with the corded variety. That’s because they are battery-powered and get progressively harder to use as the batteries run down. If you’re experiencing problems, you can able to solve things quickly simply by moving back to a cord connected mouse and keyboard.

So, is an ergonomic keyboard essential or not?

Yes and no. The most essential thing is to find a comfortable, reliable keyboard. For years I used an ergonomic keyboard and mouse yet still suffered from occasional pains. That’s because they were wireless devices. The pains went away for ever when I ditched the wireless keyboard and mouse for the flat, but cabled keyboard that came with my computer and invested $40 in a brand new ergonomic, yet cabled mouse. They’re not as cool as the wireless alternatives, but they are reliable and comfortable. That’s more important.

One last tip; if you’re in serious pain, try voice recognition software. It’s far from perfect and you will need to do some keyboarding, yet it has reached the point where it works well enough to rest sore hands.

Ergonomic Web Sites

Typing injuries

www.tifaq.com/

Includes details on alternatives to conventional keyboards and why you may want to use them.

British RSI FAQ

www.rsi-uk.org.uk/faq.txt

A bare-bones backgrounder to keyboard injuries and RSI.

Carnegie Mellon University Computer Related Repetitive Strain Injuries

www.cmu.edu/rsi/

This useful information site tells you who is at risk, how to avoid keyboard injuries and what to do if they arise.

Healthy Computing

www.healthycomputing.com

Wide-ranging site looking at a variety of computer health-related issues. There’s a good section on ergonomic issues for kids.

Security Software Shopping Tips

Go for the suite spot

You’ll need antivirus, firewall and antispyware software to keep your PCs safe from most threats. While some expert users manage to run individual products from different vendors, the applications may not play nicely together. You may even cause your system to crash. Suites are designed so that applications dovetail smoothly. They also give you a single interface to control everything. What’s more, suites are priced to be much cheaper than the sum of their components. You may need to find separate spam filtering, anti-phishing and adware software.

Check the extras

Security suites often go beyond the basics offering features like parental controls, spam filtering and tools to stop private information like passwords, account details or telephone numbers from being transmitted.

Don’t double up

It’s tempting to think that running two firewalls or antivirus programs will make your system doubly secure – it won’t. Overlapping security tools can create havoc, slowing your computer and making it hard to troubleshoot problems. Stick with one of everything, it’ll be safer not to mention cheaper.

Watch the calendar

Many commercial security software products come as one or more applications coupled with online links to an automatic updating service. Typically when you buy the product one year’s worth of updates come as part of the deal. When the year is up you’ll be given an option to pay a fee to get a further year’s worth of updates.

That’s convenient, but typically the cost of an extra year’s subscription is more or less the same as what you’d pay for new versions of the applications. As security vendors are constantly updating their technology and adding more features to their products – buying a fresh product is often the better option. What’s more, avoiding the subscription gives you an opportunity to avoid lock-in and move to a rival company’s offering.

Also, watch out for arrangements where a security software company takes your credit card details and automatically invoices for updates. They try to tell you this is a service to make life easier for you. In fact, they do it because they make a lot more money that way.

See also:

Computer security guide: 1 introduction
Computer security guide: 2 what are the main threats?
Computer security guide: 3 defensive software
Computer security guide: 5 what to buy or download for free

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Businesses think long and hard before buying computer hardware and software. Some work from finely-tuned technology plans. Others might take a more ad hoc approach, making up the rules as they go. This may sound unwise, but it has the advantage of flexibility.

Some managers consult with their end users and technology specialists before drawing up specification lists. Often business buyers prefer the security of a known brand, some seek comfort in long-standing ‘technology relationships’, and others like the prices or local service offered by smaller outlets.

Whatever the details, business people tend to put a lot of research and effort into their system and software purchases. So should you. But it’s easy to hung up worrying about the wrong things.

While it makes sense to plan software buying in detail, this might not be the case for hardware. After all, modern computer hardware is a commodity. There isn’t much difference between one brand and another. Inside they are pretty much the same. After years of conducting in-depth benchmarks (amongst other jobs I edited the Australian edition of PC Magazine), I can confirm that the difference between the top-performing brands and the average is rarely more than a couple of percent.

Whisper it quietly, but this difference is well under the margin of error. Indeed, often, when classes of computers are compared, the performance spread between the highest and the lowest is often less than the margin of error. And even if it isn’t, I challenge anyone to sit at any two similarly configured PCs and tell me which one is running five percent faster. You won’t notice any difference running Microsoft Word or working online with Firefox or any other browser.

Frankly, for people in business performance is an issue, but the performance that matters is that between different classes of machine rather than different models within a class.

Oh and before we go any further, if raw processing speed really worries you, most of the time you can boost it simply by adding more Ram. Spending a $100 on extra memory chips is the best IT investment you’ll ever make. Not only will this kick-start sluggish systems, but you’ll be able to do more work and work more productively.

Of course, benchmarking does show up poorly performing products. But these are as likely to come from the most prestigious stables as from the cheaper no-brand operators. By all means use benchmarking information to avoid the dogs, but in the long run, average performing machines are as good a purchase as the fastest.

While the performance spread of similarly specified PCs is minimal, prices tend to have more variation. Both follow the well-known bell curve. But the top and bottom performers in any class might deviate three or four percent from the average, while prices can vary by up to 20 percent; and even more if we include Apple’s expensive hardware in the list.

You might expect that prices vary with performance. They may, but only up to a point. Statisticians and economists call the way two variables interact; ‘correlation’. So, if price and performance ratings match, they would be highly correlated, if cheaper machines performed best, then they would have negative correlation. In reality, there is merely a weak correlation between price and performance.

If you draw a graph and plot performance against price, there would be some kind of pattern, but a number of points on the graph would sit a long way from any trend line or cluster. These are the machines to watch. Those that are nearest to the corner where performance is sluggish and prices are high represent the worst value. Those in the opposite corner represent the best.

It might seem like a lot of work, but this can be a worthwhile process if you need to buy a lot of hardware. However, it is worth remembering that differences in performance rarely matter, dollars in your pocket do.

So, what PC purchasing lessons are there for individuals and small business owners? The key is to get your IT spending into perspective. When shopping for hardware, you should pay more attention to the features included in the package than to any benchmarking details. Remember warranties and reliability are more important than performance. And above all else, remind yourself that a low-price, average performing system plus $100 spent on Ram will almost always give you a better return than a pricey speed demon.