Old keyboards from the 80s aren’t exactly washable, but they took a licking and kept on typing. One of the computers in my parents’ house still has an old Dell keyboard that suffered the indignity of having had an entire glass of milk spilled over the top of it — the result of an errant joystick movement. It still types.

That said, the brand new Kensington Washable Keyboard looks and feels indescribably retro. The white 104-key device with full size and full depth keys feels like typing in a bygone era in computing. I even fired up Doom 2 for a little spin around the arrow keys.

The keyboard is no relic, however. That old Dell keyboard still types, but it also still sticks from the milky punishment.

You can immerse this baby in soap and water and scrub it down like a dinner dish and come out with a new, clean keyboard.

The board also has antimicrobial coating to prevent the growth of molds, mildews and fungi that can get you sick.

Let’s face it, the keyboard is one of the dirtiest surfaces you touch all day. In the newsroom, we often share old keyboards, and they’re just grungy. I read a study once that claimed that the average keyboard holds more bacteria that a toilet seat!

Try trying to rinse out your illuminated keyboard when it gets dirty. (You could try Cyber Clean though.)

I soaked the Kensington and put it through scrubbing and rinsing and then let it dry. Let me tell you, putting a computer keyboard under the sink is NOT a natural task. The whole time I felt like I was breaking some major commandment of computing. But lo and behold, once the keyboard sat for a few and dried, it worked perfectly.

My only complaint about the keyboard is that the folding legs at the top are a little cheap. I broke one of the little legs by accident, which is enough to prevent the keyboard from being a perfect “10.”

The keyboard is comfortable to type on. A lot of newer keyboards have taken a page out of the laptop world with shallow keys, but this is a regular keyboard that feels very traditional.

With that take on things, the Kensington Washable Keyboard is a winner. It’s a regular keyboard. It’s wired — no batteries to replace. It has all the standard, regular keys that a keyboard should have. It’s the perfect solution for an office or a computer user that just wants to clean up a bit.

Time and time again, surveys are conducted, and time and time again, the same results come up: when you ask someone what the most germ filled place is they come into contact with is, they always say it’s the toilet seat or the bathroom. Turns out, that’s usually one of the cleanest. The actually worst place is the keyboard you’re touching right now. Luckily, you can clean your keyboard with Cyber Clean, an antibacterial play-doh-like gel-like membrane. Actually, it’s really hard to describe, but the pictures do it much more justice.

It makes sense how keyboards are so disgusting if you think about it. Our hands touch everything we come into contact with, and we handle our keyboards more on a daily basis than anything else. People often eat at their desks, and those crumbs are like little bacteria factories. All those crevices that are impossible to clean lead to uncontrolled bacterial growth, and often times, the spread of disease.

With back to school and the flu season approaching, not to mention the constant reminders how swine flu is going to kill us all, it’s important to arm yourself with the tools that can help you stay well. Cyber Clean is an anti-bacterial, gel-like membrane that molds and conforms itself to the shapes you press it into. In doing so it can clean and disinfect hard to reach places, like those spaces between your keys, behind air vents where dirt and dust particles can harbor germs, and all those ridges on your cell phones and electronics.

Cyber Clean is safe, non-toxic, biodegradable, and supposedly reusable up to 75 times, plus you can get the kids in on the fun too. Cyber Clean is available at most stores and drug stores, and retails for less than $10. We hope to get our hands on some soon and put it to the test in our lab and let you know how it holds up.

Your desktop keyboard mouse set just got a bit fancier. Meet the MK 700 Wireless Desktop Kit from Logitech.

Designed with all the usual ergonomic accoutrements like “finger-cradling curves” and a cushioned palm rest, the glossy black keyboard also has a build in LCD screen to give you all of the keyboard’s status symbols, like caps and num lock, mute, and a battery status indicator in a dashboard style set-up.

Speaking of batteries, this one comes with a rather impressive lifespan, with up to three years on the keyboard and a year on the mouse. We don’t remember the last time someone quoted a battery’s lifespan to us in years.

The mouse comes with a “hyper-fast” scrolling mode where the scroll wheel will move “near frictionlessly.” While we’re all about defying the laws of physics with our desktop sets, the mouse also can scroll through documents at a normal pace too.

The MK700 will ship before the end of the month to your favorite electronics store.

Despite being in a relatively technologically advanced world, we still have a lot of holdouts that are decidedly old-school. Why washers and dryers have become more efficient, they’re essentially the same machines your grandparents used. Fax machines are still the most common means of sending documents over long distances. Possibly one of the most glaring examples of this though is the keyboard that you use every day. But, the times they are a changin’, and Lenovo has decided to make some small changes to their keyboard layout which are actually making some big waves.

To understand why this is such a big deal, you have to understand where the layout of your keys was born. The layout on most keyboards is called QWERTY. The keys are actually laid out so that on average, you the most time possible between keystrokes, mostly because the layout was developed on typewriters that would jam. The layout stuck through the development of modern computing, and even though it’s clearly inefficient, we still use it. Alternatives exist, like the Dvorak layout, but these remain niche products that appeal mostly to the ubergeeks.

Laptops, and especially netbooks, pose their own set of challenges, requiring special thought to be paid to their design. Some manufactures cut the size of the shift key on their netbook’s keyboards, causing headaches and consumers had to retain themselves on how to type correctly.

Lenovo, maker of the ThinkPad, has been studying keyboard usage by installing keylogger software on volunteer’s laptops. Armed with this data, they’ve decided to make two small changes to the layout. The escape and delete keys are now twice as tall, which accommodates typists who tend to reach up to the keys instead of out to them, increasing efficiency and decreasing accidental taps.

Lenovo readily admits this layout isn’t perfect, considering that the caps lock key, bane of anyone on the receiving end of an email shouted at them and arguably the most useless key on a keyboard, still exists. Of course, intrepid users have learned how to remap the caps lock key to something more useful, like an extra command key or some fort of auto-script. Either way, we’ll probably never leave the QWERTY layout, so any finessing, no matter how small, is always welcome.