New Toys

Today's post is a little later than planned as I got caught up playing with my new keyboard and mouse that showed up today. I'd had the old set for a few years and they had been thrashed fairly well. The scroll wheel on the mouse was starting to fall off and some of the keys on the keyboard would occasionally get stuck down.
The new set feels so nice to use, I'm sure the last set felt just as good when they were new but it always surprises me how nice a new keyboard can feel to type on. The mouse is a little smaller and a lot lighter than my last one, I'm not sure if I like the way it feels when playing games or if it is just something that I need to get used to. My last mouse had adjustable weights that you could add or remove to try and get the mouse just right for you. I think that having a lighter mouse is probably better in some circumstances but the weight was probably good for being more precise in others. I treated myself to a new mouse pad too, the old one was starting to deteriorate and look quite dirty from the years of use. I ordered what was called a medium mouse pad and it is huge, well at least for me it is. I'm sure some people have bigger ones but it is the biggest I've ever had. It has to be about 40cm wide by 30cm tall, my last one was probably something like 30cm by 20cm and I thought that was quite large.
I didn't really need the RGB back lighting on the keyboard or mouse but it is hard to buy any "gaming" keyboard that doesn't have some sort of back lighting these days. I didn't buy the cheapest thing but it is by no means the most expensive, by all accounts the deal I got was pretty good. The reason I wanted a gaming keyboard was becuase I do play games on the PC. The main advantages that gaming keyboards have over normal keyboards is the anti ghosting technology. Ghosting is when you press a lot of keys very close to the same time or at the same time. A lot of regular keyboards of the cheaper kind will only register a something like four simultaneous keystrokes, once the four keys are all pressed at the same time any other keys won't register at all. Gaming keyboards usually allow for more keys to be pressed at the same time and they all register. The keyboard I've got allows for up to eight keys to be pressed at the one time.
Gaming keyboard often have other features that you can't get in standard keyboards too. For example, there is a button I can press up near the media keys that will disable the windows key from working. This is so you can't accidentally press the windows key when you are mashing the keys frantically, pressing the windows key mid-game can jump you out of the game and bring up the start menu, that can be really frustrating.
One thing I did do more for aesthetics then anything else was to buy the same brand of keyboard and mouse as my headphones, so they all match. There was some actual benefit to doing this and that was that the same piece of software manages all three of them where the last keyboard and mouse I had used a different piece of software to the headphones. By removing a background process, my PC should in theory actually run better. And because I now had all the same brand of peripherals, the mouse mat is the same brand too, just to tie it all together and look nice with the same logo on everything. That's not such a bad thing is it?

Bomber
I do a fair bit of gaming, but don't talk about it much.