Yet another noob tech question:
Ever since USB came out, I have always used a USB keyboard. Recently I had to replace mine, and accidentally bought a PS2 keyboard. I can take it back, but that means waiting in the Fry’s Electronics Communist Bread Line of Death. It seriously takes like 90 minutes to return something at that store. So: is a PS2 keyboard noticeably worse than a USB one?
There’s no difference whatsoever.
No.
To my knowledge, all you get with a USB keyboard is… one less USB slot.
I don’t trust USB to run my keyboard and mouse yet. Now before McCullough jumps in with some bizarre interpretation of that, what I mean by “trust” is I don’t trust that all software will find and work properly with my keyboard and/or mouse in the USB ports. I play older games and sometimes use/write O.G. style software which looks to those things directly at a hardware level, and while I haven’t tried it, I don’t wanna try it and be disappointed. I also occasionally load up Linux or BeOS and more often than not they don’t work well with USB keyboard/mouse configs.
Besides, as Bub already said, you may as well keep the USB ports free for other things. Having a PS2 port in use doesn’t suck up valuable resources in Windows the way unused parallel ports and COM ports (for example) do.
I use a USB keyboard and it works fine–exactly like every other keyboard I’ve ever used. But it also has two USB ports on it, which is super cool. I keep my mouse plugged into it, so the cable isn’t tangled up with everything else, and the cable for my camera, so I don’t need to get up from my desk to download photos.
So that’s what I recommend.
S
No disadvantage to a PS/2 keyboard until the day you upgrade to a PS/2-free computer.
A USB mouse can be polled faster than a PS/2 mouse, so there’s a good reason to go USB on meese. For keyboards, though, there’s no advantage to going USB at all.
I’d certainly keep it rather than deal with the return line at Fry’s. Ugh. I miss Fry’s selection, but I don’t miss their employees or procedures.
Heh, and I have at least three PS2 to USB adapters laying around here, from previous mouse or keyboard purchases.
Yeah, they are the ultimate tradeoff store. Amazing selection (particularly when you want to replace individual parts), but terrible customer service. I’ll never forget the day my finacee and I decided we needed a laptop for grad school. We go to Fry’s, I grab the nearest salesman, and I’m like, “Hi. I’d like to buy a laptop.” and he goes “Yeah? Good for you.” And then just stares at me like I’M the dickhead in this encounter. I was like “Huh. But not from you.”
Huh?
Besides, as Bub already said, you may as well keep the USB ports free for other things. Having a PS2 port in use doesn’t suck up valuable resources in Windows the way unused parallel ports and COM ports (for example) do.
Say hello to my little friends IRQ 1 and IRQ 12.
One of the great things about USB is that it is a shared bus architecture; it frees up a ton of IRQ resources. It works fine even in DOS 3.0, because your computer’s BIOS will simulate the old interface methods and map them to USB.
Whoops! Had no idea that a PS/2 mouse takes a “standard” IRQ. But it looks like the keyboard IRQ is kept no matter what, so maybe it gets used with or without USB. At the very least I imagine plug-and-play OSes hook into it for backwards compatibility… maybe not.