How to speed up the Google Gboard virtual keyboard. How to check the keyboard using online services - overview of solutions Membrane keyboard response time

Membrane keyboards are the most common type of keyboard. The principle of their operation is that a plastic membrane installed under the key closes two contacts, as a result of which a signal is transmitted to the computer to press the corresponding button. Thanks to their simple technology, these devices are low in cost, which makes them especially popular.

Membrane keyboards are the quietest: they are designed with rubber elements that soften the sound of pressing switches. In this case, the keys only work when fully pressed. Given their quiet operation and soft feedback, when typing quickly, it can be difficult to understand whether a key is pressed or not. The response time of such a gaming keyboard is from 1 ms.

The design and construction of gaming devices should provide maximum comfort while playing. Gaming keyboards differ from regular keyboards in the presence of additional keys, bright backlighting, good stability and a number of special settings.

Membrane gaming keyboard: silicone buttons, waterproof

For example, the Bloody B120 membrane gaming keyboard has 4 removable silicone WASD keys, which is especially convenient for moving in games: they do not slip, and thanks to the raised texture they are easy to find by touch. In addition, the keyboard is water-resistant: no matter what you spill on it, be it energy drink, coffee or water, it will continue to work. Water resistance is ensured by a water-repellent coating, protected electronics and a hole for liquid drainage.

In gaming keyboards, it is especially important to be able to configure additional keys for the game. The B120 has buttons for “Auto-shot”, “Turbo-shot”, three keys for purchasing an arsenal in shooters, as well as hot buttons for adjusting the volume and playing music.

+ Benefits: low price
— Disadvantages: long response time, rapid wear of materials
Features: Quietest and lightest keyboard ever

Mechanical keyboards

A mechanical keyboard has a more complex operating principle. Each key contains a switch with metal contacts. The contact closes before the press reaches the stop, and the metal spring returns the key to initial position. Mechanical devices are more expensive than membrane ones, but more reliable and durable.

Compared to membrane keyboards, mechanical gaming keyboards have better response times - 0.2 ms versus 1 ms. In addition, their keys do not need to be pressed all the way, which makes gaming and high-speed typing convenient.

The moment of contact closure in a mechanical keyboard is indicated by a characteristic click. The loud sound of the keys may be unusual for users of membrane devices: you should not work with such a keyboard in the office, so as not to disturb your colleagues. However, the sound of mechanical keys is not noticeable at all if you play with headphones or are used to it.

Due to the use of metal parts, mechanical keyboards are heavier than membrane ones. Sometimes metal becomes part of the design: for example, the top panel of the Bloody B860 is made of aluminum and decorated with a relief pattern of gears. This provides added weight and stability to the keyboard, as well as durability and corrosion resistance. This model has a built-in holder for a smartphone so that the phone always remains at hand and does not distract from the game.

The B860 uses LK (Light Strike) technology, which uses optical switches that reduce response time to 0.2 ms. In addition, the keyboard has reduced key travel, providing 25% faster keypresses than conventional metal switches. The buttons are protected by a 6mm barrier to prevent liquid ingress.

+ Advantages: fast response, strength and durability of materials
- Flaws: high price
Features: clear sound of keys, heavy weight of the device

Combination keyboards

As a rule, these are membrane keyboards that have mechanical gaming keys. Thus, this type of device combines the advantages of membrane and mechanical gadgets: they are inexpensive and quiet, but at the same time the main gaming keys have a fast response and a clear click sound.

For example, the Bloody B314 keyboard has only four mechanical keys - WASD. Their capes are made of non-slip material.

B314 has an unusual and functional design. The keyboard has 9 additional buttons located on special panels around the perimeter of the device. The gamer can assign them any functions that are useful in the game. Decorative panels in pixel style and bright three-color lighting of the gadget look unusual. Rubberized feet and a wide wrist rest provide more comfortable playing and less fatigue.

+ Advantages: fast response of gaming keys, affordable price
– Disadvantages: long response time of membrane switches
Features: combines the properties of membrane and mechanical keyboard

Flagship gaming keyboards

In eSports, not only the skill of the player is important, but also his comfort. The best gaming keyboards are mechanical, made of metal, with wide customization options for the backlight and keys. Such gadgets have an ergonomic design, thought out to the smallest detail, and are created for complete immersion in the game.

For example, the flagship gaming keyboard Bloody B845R has a unique number pad layout: it is moved to the left side, which frees up more space for the mouse. The top panel of the device is made of aluminum alloy: the keyboard is heavy and stable. For maximum player comfort, a wide rubber stand is located not only under the left hand, but along the entire keyboard.

The B845R model has animated RGB lighting with support for up to 16.8 million color options. Using special software, you can adjust the required brightness and color, create your own backlight options for each group of keys, save them and share them with friends. In addition, the keyboard is backlit on the sides.

+ Advantages: fast response, special ergonomics, special settings lighting, strength and durability of materials
– Disadvantages: most expensive gaming keyboards
Peculiarities: this type keyboards designed specifically for gaming and eSports

Many users question the keyboard settings in Windows 10 (some sounds are buggy). They come across a strange issue: the keyboard is slow. The system takes a couple of seconds to display the typed letters. Well, there are a wide range of reasons for this that lead to an inactive keyboard. The i8042 driver that runs on PS/2 may not install exactly at the time of installation, or the machine may have some features that lead to the keyboard slowing down and similar things that interfere with the normal functioning of the keyboard.
There are many possible reasons, here in this article we are writing 3 separate tips that will help you in overcoming this problem. Follow the tips one by one and any of these 3 will solve the problem according to the keyboard issues. Hence, let's start trying our tips to fix a slow keyboard in Windows 10.

How to fix the keyboard running slowly in Windows 10

1. With input filtering

First of all, it will be very good that you check whether your machine is facing the input filtering feature or not. If enabled, it will be slow to enter repeated keys, and if you don't pay attention to key presses that occur continuously. Therefore, you should disable this feature. There are two places from where you can set it to off. Let's look at them separately.

Open Control Panel on the screen using any of the methods you are used to.
Once the Control Panel appears on the screen, it will appear in a small form so that all the symbols are displayed correctly. Look for easy access to the center. Click when you see it.

Click the Make the keyboard easier to use button to make changes if necessary.

Now you need to find the option to enable input filtering. If you notice that its cell is on, clear it and set it to Off. and click Apply and OK button to apply the changes.

The same can be obtained from the settings app. See how to do it there -

Once the Settings app appears on your screen, find the category - Ease of Access.

From the segments available in the left column, select Keyboard.

There are many other options on the right side of the same storefront. Go through them and find the input filtering section - Filter keys. If you see it activated, set it to Disable using the slider.

2. Through keyboard properties

Another important part is checking the keyboard properties. Using the slider, you can adjust the delay of letter repetition and the repetition of cursor blinking. Find your path in the steps below.

Open Control Panel on your screen and look for the tiny symbols keyboard symbol.

A separate and individual Keyboard Properties dialog box appears. On the Speed ​​tab, you can see the repeat delay and repeat speed sliders.

The first slider concerns how long a button must be pressed before the keyboard repeats the letters. Adjust the slider to suit your preference.

Now, the second slider says, If you move it to the right, the letters on the keyboard will repeat more quickly. Taking this into account, drag it to the left to slow down the repeated pressing of letters on the keyboard.

Make adjustments according to your preferences. Click OK to confirm the changes.

3. Through the registry editor

The i8042 driver that controls the PS/2 port may not have been properly entered into the registry during the installation phase, resulting in a sluggish keyboard. Tweak at the points given below -

Open the registry editor so that it is on your screen by typing regedit.exe in cortana.

You need to follow this path to make the changes:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE => SYSTEM => CurrentControlSet => Services => i8042prt => Parameters

On the opposite side of the parameters, find out the PollStatusIterations type is DWORD. If you can't find it, then you need to install it. Right click and select New => DWORD (32 bit) Value and name it the same.

Start editing it in the administration window by right-clicking on the DWORD and selecting change the parameter.

Under the data value field, set the value to 1. Click OK.

Save all current work and reboot the system.

All three tips described above in order to fix slow work The keyboards in Windows 10 are all different, but they are all related. So, I always advise to find your problem areas and then treat that problem accordingly. If you have any advice, please help us in the comments below.

If you look at "gaming" keyboards, many of them sell for $100 or more on claims of being fast. IN advertisements You can find statements like this:

• Specially designed keys that reduce press registration time
• 8 TIMES FASTER - 1000Hz polling rate: 0.1 millisecond response time
• Gain an absolute edge over your opponents with ultra-fast 45g key switches and 40% faster actuation than standard Cherry MX Red switches
• World's highest polling rate of 1000 Hz
• World's fastest gaming keyboard, 1000Hz polling rate, 0.001 second response time

The situation with gaming keyboards is a lot like talking to a car salesman:

Salesman: This car is super safe! She has twelve airbags!
I: That's good, but how does it look in crash tests?
Salesman: Twelve airbags!

Of course, gaming keyboards have a polling rate of 1000 Hz, but so what?

Two obvious questions arise:

How important is keyboard response?

This all started because I couldn't shake the feeling that old computers seemed to respond faster to keystrokes than modern machines. For example, an iMac G4 running macOS 9 or Apple 2 seems faster than my system Kaby Lake at 4.2 GHz. I never trusted these sensations because decades of research had shown that users often experience sensations that are exactly the opposite of reality, so I took a high-speed camera and started measuring the actual delay between pressing a key and the character appearing on the screen, as well as the delay in speed cursor response to mouse movement. As it turned out, the seemingly fast old computers actually turned out to be fast, much faster than my modern computer - on computers from the 70s and 80s, the delay between pressing a key and the character appearing on the screen was often between 30 and 50 ms without any modifications , while on modern computers it is often in the range of 100 to 200 ms when pressing a button in the console. It's possible to get the response down to 50ms in well-optimized games with fancy gaming setups, and there's one extraordinary consumer device that easily beats the 5us mark, but most others are much slower. Modern computers have greatly increased bandwidth, but response times don't look as great.

Either way, when measured, my 4.2GHz Kaby Lake had the fastest single-threaded performance of any computer you can buy, but the response time was worse than a fast machine from the 70s (about 6 times slower than Apple 2), which is a little strange. To find out where the latency occurs, I started measuring the keyboard response time because it is the first part of the I/O pipeline. I planned to evaluate latency from start to finish, starting with the first link and eliminating the keyboard as the real source of latency. But it turned out that keyboards have a very significant delay! I was very surprised that the median latency of the tested keyboards exceeded the response time of the entire Apple 2 pipeline. If you do not immediately understand the depth of this absurdity, consider that the Apple 2 processor has only 3500 transistors at 1 MHz, and Atmel estimates that modern top-end keyboards have about 80 thousand transistors at 16 MHz. This is 20 times more transistors, which operate at 16 times clock frequency- keyboards today are more powerful than the computers themselves of the 70s and 80s! And yet the average median keyboard today adds the same amount of latency as the entire I/O pipeline, all the way to the display, on a fast 70s machine.

Let's look at the response time characteristics of some keyboards:

The "Interface" column indicates the connection type: USB FS follows the USB Full-Speed ​​protocol, which supports polling up to 1000 Hz - a feature often advertised in top-end keyboards. USB follows the USB Low-Speed ​​protocol, which is used in most keyboards. The "Game" column indicates whether the game is positioned this model like a gaming keyboard. "Wireless" means the presence of some special receiver, and "unified" means wireless standard Logitech.

As you can see, even on such a limited set of keyboards, the difference in response time is 45 ms. Thus, modern computer with one of the slowest keyboards there is no way it can respond as quickly to key presses as fast car 70-80s because the keyboard alone is slower than the entire I/O pipeline on those old computers.

This has established the fact that modern keyboards are a significant factor in the increase in latency that has occurred over the past 40 years. Another question is whether the latency of a modern keyboard really matters to users? From the table we see a difference in latency of about 40 ms. Is this difference noticeable? Let's compare keyboard response times and examine some empirical studies on human perception.

There is a significant amount of research that suggests that on very simple tasks, people are able to perceive a delay of 2 ms or less. Moreover, the increase in latency is not only noticeable to users, but also causes simple tasks to be performed less accurately. If you want a visual demonstration of what latency looks like and you don't have an old computer at hand, here is an MSR demo on touchscreen latency.

Are gaming keyboards really faster than regular keyboards?

Gaming keyboards often advertise features that improve response time, such as USB FS connectivity and 1000Hz polling. USB Low-Speed ​​specifications set a minimum time between packets of 10 ms, i.e. 100 Hz. However, USB devices often round this value to the nearest power of two and operate at 8 ms, i.e. 125 Hz. With an 8ms gap between packets, the average delay due to having to wait for the next round of polling is 4ms. With a 1ms polling interval, the average latency from USB polling is 0.5ms, giving us a difference of 3.5ms. While this may be a noticeable increase in latency for fast keyboards like the Apple Magic, it's clear that keyboard response time is more dependent on other factors, and the gaming keyboards in our test are so slow that the 3.5ms savings don't save them.

Conclusion

People don't differentiate between 100 and 200 ms latency

Another problem with this kind of argument is this. If you accept it, then nothing prevents you from adding 10 ms of delay at each stage of the I/O pipeline - in the end total time will be greatly inflated and we will end up with a situation like now, where you buy a computer with the fastest processor on the market, and its response time is six times worse than a machine from the 70s.

It doesn't matter because the game refreshes at 60 FPS

Keyboards cannot be faster than 5/10/20ms to eliminate false repeats

An additional problem with bounce latency is that most keyboard manufacturers seem to confuse polling speed with bounce latency. You can often find keyboards with polling rates between 100 and 200 Hz. This is justified by statements like “There is no reason to increase the polling rate because the delay in eliminating false repeated clicks is 5 ms” - this combines both misconceptions described above. If you take the circuits out Apple keyboards 2e, you will see that the polling frequency there is approximately 50 kHz. The latency to eliminate false repeated clicks is approximately 6 ms, which corresponds to a frequency of 167 Hz. Why poll the keyboard so often? With fast scanning, the keyboard controller immediately begins timing the delay to eliminate false repeats (after a maximum of 20 microseconds), unlike modern keyboards that poll at 167 Hz. Because of this, the countdown for re-triggering can begin after 6 ms, that is, the pause takes 300 times longer.

I apologize for the lack of clarification on terminology, but I think anyone who makes such an argument should also understand the explanation :-).

Appendix: experimental setup

The start of the measurement was initiated by simultaneously pressing two keys - one on the keyboard, and the second connected to the logic analyzer. A certain error appears here, because it is impossible to press two keys absolutely simultaneously. To calibrate the setup, we used two identical keys connected to the logic analyzer. The median error was less than 1 ms, and 90% of the errors fell within 5 ms. For really fast keyboards, errors of this size make measurements impossible with this setup, but in our case, average latency measurements can be considered acceptable. It is likely that the push-button error can be reduced to a negligible amount by designing a device that simultaneously pushes a button and turns on the logic analyzer. With this setup, the accuracy of measuring average values ​​will also improve (because it will be easier to carry out a large number of tests).

If you want to know the exact installation configuration, the E-switch LL1105AF065Q was used. Power and ground are provided by the Arduino board. There is no specific reason to use this particular configuration. In fact, it’s a little absurd to use an entire Arduino for power, but we made everything from spare parts, and these parts ended up in the laboratory of our coworking center, with the exception of the switches. There were no two identical copies of any switch, so we had to buy several for calibration on the same equipment. Specific Model doesn't matter here; Any switch with low ohmic resistance will do.

During the tests, the z key was pressed - byte 29 was checked USB bus, and then the time of the first packet with the relevant information was recorded. But as in the above situation, any key will do.

In reality, I don’t really trust this configuration and to test a large number of keyboards I would like to build a completely automatic installation. While our results are consistent with one other test we could find online, this setup likely has an error range of 1 to 10 ms. Although averaging the results of multiple runs of a test theoretically reduces the error, since the measurements are performed by a human, it is not necessary or even likely that the errors will be independent and disappear after averaging.

I'm trying to find more phone and computer models to take measurements on and would be happy to do a quick test on your system or device if it's not listed! If you live far away and want to donate a device for testing, you can send it to my address:

Dan Luu
Recurse Center
455 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10013

You can help and transfer some funds for the development of the site

Those who on their smartphones, tablets and other devices with operating system Android on board uses Google's proprietary keyboard, which has recently been renamed Gboard; we noticed that it does not always work as fast as in the old days.

This is reflected in an increase in the time it takes for hints of the next words to appear, as well as in a slower operation of the auto-correction system. If the rest of the new Google keyboard suits you, then today I want to tell you how you can significantly speed up its operation.

It's very easy to do.

How to speed up the Google Gboard virtual keyboard

1. First of all, go to the application settings menu. You can do this by long tapping on the Google logo symbol located on the left side of the keyboard toolbar, and then on the gear icon (screenshot in the header).

2. In the Gboard settings menu, select "Text Correction"

3. In the text correction options window that opens, turn off the switches next to the “Suggest names” and “Individualize hints” items.

All. Now your Gboard virtual keyboard will work at its previous speed.

The price to pay for speeding up your work will be the absence of hints when entering text based on the contents of your address book and, perhaps, a slightly less accurate operation of the prediction system, which, however, unlike the acceleration of the keyboard, most users most likely will not notice.

The keyboard is the main one mechanical device for entering information into a PC or laptop. While working with this manipulator, problems may arise. unpleasant moments, when the keys get stuck, the wrong characters are entered that we press, and so on. To solve such a problem, you need to know exactly where it lies: in the mechanics of the input device or in the software in which you type the text. This is exactly where online services for testing the main tool for working with text will help us.

Thanks to the existence of such web resources online, users no longer need to install software, which is not always free. Keyboard test can be performed different ways and each of them will have its own result. You will learn more about this below.

Online input device testing

There are a few popular services to check the correct functioning of the manipulator. They all differ slightly in methodology and approach to the process, so you can choose the one that is closest to you. All web resources have a virtual keyboard, which will imitate your mechanical one, thus allowing you to identify a breakdown.

The first tester in question is English-speaking. However, no knowledge of English is required because the site provides just the right amount of features you need to test your typing device. The main thing when checking on this site is attentiveness.

Note! The service does not distinguish between duplicate buttons on your keyboard. There are 4 of them in total: Shift, Ctrl, Alt, Enter. If you want to check each of them, click them one by one and look at the result in the virtual manipulator window.

Method 2: Key-Test

Functional of this service similar to the previous one, but has much more nice design. As with the previous resource, the functional essence of the Key Test is to check whether each key is pressed correctly. However, there are small advantages - this site is Russian.

The virtual keyboard on the Key-Test service looks like this:

As in previous method, you need to press the duplicate keys one by one to check their functionality. On the screen, one of the duplicates will be displayed as one button.

Testing your keyboard is a simple but painstaking process. To fully test all keys, time and extreme care are required. If faults are found after the test, it is worth repairing the broken mechanism or buying a new input device. If in text editor the tested keys do not work fully, but they worked during the test, which means you have problems with the software.