I picked up an Acer Aspire One 10.1″ netbook a couple of months back, to replace my Dell Inspiron 4000 – which ultimately decided that it didn’t like staying powered on.  Full details in a Piper’s Pages post, do the search.

Anyhoo, the short of the netbook purchase is that I wanted a small device running a full OS, since it became clear to me that portability was becoming increasingly important over sheer computing muscle.  A screen size of 10″ was the minimum I was willing to tolerate, and the keyboard had to resemble a full keyboard as much as possible.

So I picked up the Acer on sale and was generally happy, but I have to admit that I deliberated for about 60 minutes in the store; the keyboard had a few characters in the wrong place, and green French characters adorned about 40% of the keys and was a distracting eye-sore.  I had done my due diligence before visiting the store and OK’d the keyboard layout I saw online, but here it was in the store that the keyboard was different.  I Google’d the situation on my phone and found out that laptops/netbooks gracing Canadian shelves often have a combined English/French layout in order to comply with Canadian language laws.

<sigh>

So that’s the background.  A few weeks back I found a US keyboard on eBay for the earth-shattering price of $15, free shipping from Hong Kong, so I pushed the “Buy Now” button and prepared myself for the customs fees.

Long story short – keyboard came, I popped it in thanks to a handy how-to video on YouTube, and I can now say that I’ve done my part to fall in line with French-ignorant Canadians in the Great White North.