Peripherals Are Important, Too!
Additional time to ponder over my pending upgrade led me to research getting a new keyboard and mouse. My current ones work fine, but they’re both fairly basic and I’d like to have a few more buttons on each that I can customize for various (nefarious) purposes. Specifically, some thumb buttons on my mouse would be nice (I’ve gotten used to navigating forward/back in my browser history with those) and come customizable keys on my keyboard for launching programs. My only requirement is the the mouse must be cordless; I’m not enough of an insane, basement-dwelling, overobsessed fanatic to think that I need the extra nanosecond response time that a corded mouse would give me, and I love not having to deal with a cord on my desk. The keyboard, however, moves around so little that I’m perfectly fine with having a corded version there.
So, after doing a little research, I discovered one probably purchase and one possible purchase. The probable one is the Logitech G11 keyboard which has 18(!) programmable keys for my customizing pleasure, and in a very cool feature, is backlit so that the keys can be seen in the dark. The only possible purchase is the Logitech G7 mouse, mainly because of the horrendous battery life that it seems to get. With my current mouse (the LX5, part of a wireless desktop bundle), I maybe have to change the batteries twice a year. With the G7, apparently the battery life is only measured in hours (of actual use time). It comes with two battery packs and a place to charge them in the transmitter stand, but I’m just not sure if that’s something I want to deal with. I’ll likely be doing more research on the mouse front, but I will likely be getting some sort of new mouse with all the rest of my computer parts.