Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

I bought a Dell 600m laptop about a month ago using one of Dell's infamous discount code combinations. I've been pretty happy so far, except I wish I had gotten one with built-in BlueTooth. I'm able to send .jar files to my phone via the infrared port, but BlueTooth would be much easier.

So this Dell replaced a Sony Vaio laptop that I had for a really long time. It's amazing how my typing had become so accustomed to the layout of my old Vaio. I use the Delete key a lot when I type, and on the Vaio, it was the far right corner button, which was really convenient to find.

Now, on my new Dell, I find myself constantly trying to hit the Delete key and end up hitting the Page Up key. I'm a pretty fast typer, especially when just typing text vs. coding (like blogging for instance), but it's not a pretty sight when I expect to hit the Delete key and end up hitting the Page Up. It totally throws me out of kilter, my hands lose where I am on the keyboard and I start typing garbage and totally lose my focus.

The weird thing is that the Dell keyboard is much more like the keyboards on my home and work desktops: |Insert|Home| PageUp |
|Delete|End |PageDown|

I could remap things, but I think the Dell layout is probably a better one. Let's hope that I can clear the Vaio layout from my mind soon.

The funny thing is that in the last month, I was using two other laptops with still different configurations. I took a Cognos class for a week and worked on a Toshiba Satellite and my mom got a new HP Pavilion. None of them had the same layout, and one of them even had a Windows Start key somewhere in the upper right!