The big brown truck delivered the freshly-manufactured clicky keyboard with a semi-future-proof (in this sense, it’s only the future if I live to see it) connector, and the true-blue IBM Model M ‘board with a semi-hemi modern PS/2 connector. I tried them out without hooking them up to the computer. The USB keyboard felt at least as good as the IBM one, so I swapped it for the Lexmark keyboard that had the strange layout and was missing the number pad.
I worked away happily for almost three weeks. I thought I was finished with keyboard flakiness. Last night I was typing away when I noticed that the computer was ignoring me. A reboot fixed it. I am now forced to consider that it is the OS after all, and therefore, given the frequency of the occurrence of the error, essentially unfixable. It is extremely unlikely that it could be a hardware problem, since the old keyboard used the PS/2 connection and the new one uses USB.
I also have discarded what was in all likelihood a perfectly good keyboard.
Computers: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
Just because your OS may be having problems now doesn’t mean that the keyboard wasn’t bad too. I recently made a keyboard switch because some keys on the one I am using now were sticking. That keyboard caused my computer to crash and restart itself several times a day, often in the midst of a blog post or editing in photoshop I tried to remember what I had done recently to cause this problem and realized I had switched out the keyboard. I still have no idea what was wrong with that other keyboard, but now that I’ve changed back, no more crashes!
To look at it your way, I’d have to believe that two things failed. It’s possible, but unlikely.
There’s the story about a man with an imperfect knowledge of statistics who carried a bomb on board an airliner. When his friends found out about it, they were aghast. He said it was a safety measure, explaining that the odds of a bomb on an airliner were one in a million, but that the odds of two bombs on the same airliner were one in a trillion.