... as long as I didn't have to pay my own money for its over-priced shiney hardware
I don't :-)
... as long as I'm allowed to install Vista on it
You are
... and if only it came with a keyboard where the keys are in the right places.
They are. They're basically in the same place as an American keyboard. (And trust me, if you ever spend a year being forced to use a French AZERTY keyboard but manage to persuade your employer to let you load the US keyboard drivers you too will learn to love that layout!). Why the British arbitrarily decided to move all the keys around 30 years ago I will never know, presumably because the Americans had computers then and we still had typewriters and we'd never heard of things like backslash and tilde.
Incidentally, it's a lot easier to generate keystrokes for any missing characters on a Mac keyboard than it is on Windows. I know alt-U will give me an umlaut, alt-E an acute accent, alt-3 a hash character, and so on - all very intuitive shortcuts - but even after 20 years of using Windows I still don't know how to type café on an English PC keyboard!
Register
@Andrew Martin
... as long as I didn't have to pay my own money for its over-priced shiney hardware
I don't :-)
... as long as I'm allowed to install Vista on it
You are
... and if only it came with a keyboard where the keys are in the right places.
They are. They're basically in the same place as an American keyboard. (And trust me, if you ever spend a year being forced to use a French AZERTY keyboard but manage to persuade your employer to let you load the US keyboard drivers you too will learn to love that layout!). Why the British arbitrarily decided to move all the keys around 30 years ago I will never know, presumably because the Americans had computers then and we still had typewriters and we'd never heard of things like backslash and tilde.
Incidentally, it's a lot easier to generate keystrokes for any missing characters on a Mac keyboard than it is on Windows. I know alt-U will give me an umlaut, alt-E an acute accent, alt-3 a hash character, and so on - all very intuitive shortcuts - but even after 20 years of using Windows I still don't know how to type café on an English PC keyboard!