I work, as do most of the people at Quercus, on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop. They are great machines and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the entire line to anyone who is looking for a good desktop replacement. It's only real drawback is that the internal HDD is a little on the small size.  We also run most of our applications in a virtual machine or through a citrix server.  And this is where it sometimes gets goofy.

Every once in a while, and for no apparent reason, the keyboard would remap itself.  The basic keys (a-z & 0-9) would remain the same, but everything else would shuffle around.  The ' key would suddenly turn into the ` key, and the " would become the ~.  The \ became an E with an accent on top, and the # would become a /.  All in all, it made it very difficult to cut code.  Even typing a basic letter was difficult.  Rebooting the machine would sometimes fix the problem, but not always.  A cold boot would usually fix the problem, but again, not always.  To make it even odder, the keyboard would be fine if you left the virtual machine environment.

Well, this happened to me just the other day while I was writing some code.  One second my keyboard was fine, and the next it was confused.  I had always figured that there was a key combination that was causing this, but I could never find it, even after looking on Dell's forums and trying Google.  What do you search for?  I tried "keyboard remapped" and "keys change position", but they didn't get any useful hits.

So this last time it happened I started playing with the keys that my fingers were close to when the keyboard shifted.  And lo-and-behold, this is what I found.

Shift + Ctrl + Fn

Hold down the three keys together for a second, and release them simultaneously (that seems to be important), and the keyboard will go back to normal.  Or at least, it's worked everytime since I first discovered it.

Incidently, if you ever get a Logitec keyboard that has the extended (non-english) characters on the sides of the keys (I have one at work), you will notice that the keys don't randomly remap, but they instead change to the non-US keyboard.  I'm guessing Dell just puts the right keys on top of the keyboard for the layout you order, but all of the machines are capable of handling any of their keyboard layouts.  I just wish that it actually changed the keyboard in Windows (it still shows US standard) or gave you a popup, or at least a help file somewhere that told you how to un-do it.  Why it sometimes survives a reboot and sometimes not is beyond me, you'd think it would either be written to permanent storage somewhere or not...