As someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer, I am pretty finicky about my keyboards layouts. Everything else being equal, my major pet peeve is having dedicated page-navigation keys (Page-Up, Page-Down, Home, and End). These are used a lot in word processing and programming, and are also handy for web browsing.
Even though space is at a premium for netbooks, I can’t understand is why manufacturers don’t optimize for having these dedicated keys at the expense of other less frequently used ones.
Take a look at the EEE PC 1000 HE keyboard below:
Asus opted to use function-combination keys for the page-navigation keys, but kept standalone Pause and Print-screen keys. And almost all manufacturers do this! When was the last time you used pause? And have you ever used the sys-req key, let alone know what it’s for? Those two could easily be function-combo keys instead.
Next on my personal list of keys to replace would be the context menu key (to the left of the right-CTRL key above). Some people may use it more, but since it’s the same as the right-mouse key, I almost never do.
I will be looking into keyboard remapping tools to fix this problem.
I prefer Acer’s design for the Aspire One where the arrow keys are offset lower than the others, resulting in an extra row and dedicated paging keys:
This results in smaller keys, but is a good tradeoff.