>>If you're a good touch-typist it takes about 2 hours to get used to these keyboards - most of that time spent in teaching yourself to relax your wrists and shoulders rather than scrunch them together like you need to for conventional keyboards. The only thing I don't like about the keyboard is that MS decided to put the "6" key to the left rather than the right; this means that your left index finger has to handle 4,5, and 6, while the right one does just 7. If you've been touch-typing on a conventional keyboard it takes some time to get used to that - your right index finger pounding the gap when you want a "6" :)
>>
>>Durability of my keyboards has been excellent. My daily driver is 9 years old; my other one is 15 years old, and was the daily driver until #2 came along.
>
>One if the more long-lived products, if you look at the product specs:
>
>Computer/Operating System
> One of the following:
># Windows® version 3.1 or later
># Windows NT® Workstation or Server version 3.51 or later
># Microsoft MS-DOS® version 3.1 or later
> Connectivity An available PS/2 or Universal Serial Bus (USB) port (USB requires Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows 98)
>
>I still have two with the insert-scroll dwn buttons alined horizontally -
>these buttons get heavy usage over here and I could not switch to the 3 row layout -
>bought one of those and sold it again. But I'm hooked to the big split.
>Left hand use is for irrelevant scratching while numbers are being entered
>via numbers board at the right ;-)
>
>Will probably have to get half a dozen soon as my bunch is getting older
>before they stop selling the line - perhaps I can retool my habits if all my keyboards
>have the 3*2 layout...

It's amazing how people will agonize over CPU choices, HD, memory etc. but they don't spend any time with the things they use *all* the time, namely keyboard and mouse. Many don't even realize much better alternatives to the $6 OEM specials exist.