My old keyboard is almost dead.  I bought it several years ago, and it is finally wearing out.  The little rubber contacts underneath the keys are breaking, so the key stops working.  I had bought the keyboard originally for my cluster system, but I ended up using it as my regular, everyday keyboard.  It has “laptop style” keys: a very small depth difference on pressing the key and a scissor-switch-like design.  I say scissor-switch-like because I had discovered that the keys were indeed missing the scissors.  Thus, the rubber contacts were receiving the full force of the key presses; it’s no surprise that they were breaking after years of use.  When the first few broke, I replaced them with those from keys that I didn’t use (Insert, Scroll Lock, etc.).  As more and more started to break, I began to run out of keys to replace them with.  Yesterday, I decided that it was time to buy a new keyboard.  And heck, I thought I’d buy a new mouse along with it.

I found a really nice Kensington keyboard.  It was very slim, used the exact same keyboard layout as my existing one (which was made by some company named EagleTouch), and had real scissor-switch keys.  I honestly think that it has improved my typing speed, even over my last keyboard.  The multimedia keys all work fine, thanks to a little xmodmap magic.  The keycodes are the same as my previous keyboard, so I didn’t have to change anything.  The keyboard was around $30.
I’ve been using a wireless Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 1.0 for a while now.  Its age is starting to show, given the lack of a tilting wheel to support horizontal scrolling.  It also eats up batteries like crazy.  I ended up buying a Logitech G5 gaming mouse for about $70.  It’s pretty amazing, to say the least.  It’s a wired mouse (for faster response times), supports three DPI modes (400, 800, and 2000), is very smooth on my mousepad.  Oh yeah, it also has a weight cartridge that allows the user to add up to 36 grams of weight to the mouse to adjust the momentum.  I really love how smooth the mouse tracking is.  It only has two very minor downsides, in my opinion.  First, it doesn’t have a second thumb button like my IntelliMouse does (I use it to switch applications).  Second, the middle button is a bit vague about whether it has been pressed or not.  Granted that I’m not quite used to having the tilt wheel yet, so I tend to press the middle button from the side; that’s part of the problem.  However, I don’t hear a firm click when I press the middle button.  I haven’t had time to game with it yet, but I’ll be sure to do that very soon.  By the way, I have been playing an interesting gametype in UT2004.  Mutant with Instagib is really fast-paced and makes for very quick, explosive games.

To get the mouse to work well in Linux, I followed these instructions from a Linux gamer.  To get the horizontal scroll wheel working in Firefox, I followed these instructions.

I’m quite happy with both of my purchases.