A friend just e-mailed me for PC advice and I want to make sure I’m giving the correct answer.
She needs to buy a new keyboard, but her PC is several years old and her current keyboard is the 5 pin type. Will she be able to buy any of the newer keyboards and use an adapter? Do most keyboards these days come with that adapter? If she has any free USB ports will that work okay? I think she still uses Windows 95.
I assume you mean the smaller 5-pin mini-DIN (PS/2, about 3/8" diam.) plug as opposed to the even older 5-pin full DIN (about 1/2" diam.) plug? In any case, most new keyboards these days come with USB plugs, and some come with a USB-PS/2 adapter; this adapter can also be purchased separately. In case it’s a standard DIN, there are PS/2-DIN adapters as well. If you look around, you can find keyboards still being sold with PS/2 plugs.
About 3 hours ago I bought a generic keyboard at Office Depot. The keyboard cable ends in a USB connector, and it included a USB-to-PS/2 adaptor so it could be used with an older machine. It cost $14.99.
Rocket science this ain’t.
I think pretty much all keyboards are USB natively now; almost none have the PS/2 connector as the end of the wire. Funny enough, the more expensive keyboards I looked at did not include the PS/2 adapor. I guess they don’t think many people are going to buy $100 keyboards for 8 year old machines. And they’re probably right.
Oddly enough, most laptop docks (aka port replicators) have PS/2 ports in addition to USB. I don’t know if that’s because the corporate world still has billions of older PS/2 keyboards, or just because there’s enough physical space on the dock that they can easily include the jacks.
Microsoft still make a PS/2 keyboard.
And annoyingly, in the U.K., they don’t mention on the packaging that it’s PS/2. Which is kind of annoying when you buy it for someone who doesn’t have a docking station for their laptop.
Oh. For somebody else… I thought the “y” key died on ya.