Alex Le’s Blog

I have to keep reminding myself that I’m almost done with this freaking Lenovo notebook. It’s gonna be the end of a series of my daily frustration and cursing at whoever designed this god forbid keyboard. I’m using a Lenovo 3000 N100 and guess what: the FN key and Ctrl key are switched. Even worse: there is no direct way to use the HOME/ END buttons. I have to use a combo of FN and Page Up for HOME and FN + Page Down for END. Sometimes I missed the FN key, the cursor would jump up or down one page since I was then hitting Page Up/Down instead. Imagine when you are focusing on the screen, and bam, your code is gone no where in sight. Your line of thought is disrupted, you suddenly become disoriented. Not only do I feel the anger and hatred on a daily basis, my buddy who happens to have the same exact Lenovo model also share the frustration with me: whoever at Lenovo/IBM approved the keyboard design to get through QA should be hang, or brutally beaten to dead and got beaten some more.

To save myself from committing such a hideous crime (I still want to do it), I got myself a Dell Latitude D830. So far I find myself really enjoying the normal keyboard layout of the Dell 830. I can’t stress the “normal” part well enough. The Ctrl button is there at a corner for a reason and no sane people would combine FN + Page Up/Down for the frequently used Home/End buttons. It’s such a silly thing about keyboard design that Lenovo/IBM whimsically decide to switch keys around (ha ha, you buy our laptop, pwned!). I should seriously consider suing Lenovo for the amount of frustration and loss of productivity causing by their laptop, making a case of “Lenovo vs. the People”
To sum up: if you want to get the Lenovo 3000 N100: DON’T! Spend money on something else that would bring you happiness, like buying your loved ones dinners, or rather send me some money for this advice.