I'm considering replacing my Das III with either a Filco tenkeyless (if I opt to stick with the tried and true Cherry blues) or possibly a Realforce 87U if I decide to try something different (also depending on whether my current eBay auctions raise enough cash to stave off a serious beat down from the wife unit in the event she notices the Topre price tag).
The main two reasons I want to retire the Das III are (1) that it has developed a highly annoying intermittent problem where the left shift key "forgets" that it's being held down when doing things like selecting multiple lines of text with the arrow keys or page up / down, and (2) I need to do something to change up my mousing position because I'm starting to get occasional pain and stiffness in my right wrist, and I'm hoping centering the keyboard and moving the mouse closer might help.
Unfortunately, as an IT Monkey at a grocery store chain, I do actually use the number pad fairly often for looking up UPC numbers, etc, so I'll most likely have to add on a separate keypad off to the side if I find the number row on the tenkeyless to be too hard to adapt to.
So...my question is, are there any keypads out there that meet the following requirements?
1) $45 USD or less
2) Double-wide ZERO key (I never use the 00 key that the Filco model appears to have in the photos I've seen)
3) "Independent" NumLock operation. By this, I mean that pressing the NumLock key on the keypad should *NOT* toggle the NumLock status of the main QWERTY keyboard. So for instance, you should be able to plug the keypad into a laptop and type numbers in *without* turning on the embedded number pad function on the laptop's keyboard. The last keypad I had (I forget the brand, but I think it was a ThinkPad one) would only type numbers if you turned on NumLock on the laptop, which meant that you then had to turn NumLock OFF again if you wanted to type letters. This made it almost pointless IMHO, because in that case, you may as well just use the embedded number pad function on the laptop. I'm hoping this was a quirk and that most keypads *DON'T* work that way.