Question, every so often in MS Word you’ll be typing and suddenly the keyboard will lock.
Now I know in Macs if you were to do certain functions like hit shift 5 times I think it was, it would activate a certain key functions.
Does anyone know of a keyboard combo that could cause the keyboard to lock in Word for PCs. Like I said I used to be able to hit the shift so many times on my Mac and it would lock the keyboard. Then you would hit it so many time with alt or ctl and it would release.
Also does anyone know if this is a WORD thing or does it work in Excel and others as well.
I know that occasionally my computer will mess up, such that typing E opens up the windows explorer, R starts Run Program, F starts find file, D minimizes everything then brings it all back (if pushed more than once), M minimizes everything but WON’T bring it back. It’s really frustrating, though it doesn’t happen that often.
Now imagine you’re on AIM talking to someone when this happens. How do you explain that you have to restart?
coput isnt woking. got to boot.
Fortunately, I found out that I can capitalize letters to get around it.
My kEyboaRD is MESSED up, I’vE got to ReStaRt.
ShEESh, it’S annoying.
Oh, and I don’t know what causes it, sorry, but restarting fixes it.
By locked I mean the keyboard will not move or rather the curser. Also sometimes you hit shift and it will move the curser back and erase not go forward.
Now again when I used to handle Macs there were certain “Codes” that would lock a keyboard. In other words no one could type until the unlock “code” was entered. But the code for locking it was something like “Hit space bar 5 consecutive times.” This was all to easy for a frustrated person to lock his computer keyboard up without knowing it.
I am assuming maybe in PCs there are similar codes, which for instance cause the shift bar to move the curser backwards and you just unknowingly hit the code.
You are correct when you say 99% of the time restarting the computer fixes it.
Some of my computers in the past have had ‘alt stick’ or ‘ctrl stick’ or ‘shift stick’ problems, and to solve it I just had to figure out what key was stuck and push it again to fix it. No reboote required there.
Surgoshan - Next time you have the problem you mentioned (F starts find file; R starts run program and so on) try one of these.
Hit ALT. Hitting ALT by itself activates the menus and keystrokes are interpreted as the accelerator keys for commands. Hitting ALT again (or escape) will take you out of this mode.
Make sure your window is active. In Windows if you click on the desktop outside of your window the desktop itself becomes active. At this point, keystrokes are interpreted as accelerator keys for the Start menu.
I don’t know if this is the problem you are having but you might give it a try.
“Drink your coffee! Remember, there are people sleeping in China.”
I read this as a hardware problem, but maybe I read incorrectly. Hit your number lock key- does the indicator LED on the keyboard toggle on & off? If not then your machine has gone numb and no longer recognizes the keyboard at all, and the mouse is probably frozen too. I don’t know why this would happen only when Word is open, but hardware lock-ups are frequently cause by IRQ/DMA conflicts, which is something too ugly to even attempt to go into here. :eek:
Seek out your friendly local PC guru for an on-site diagnosis.
If you have Word set to auto-save and you’re working on a large document it will “freeze” when it’s doing the save. If that’s the case it will free up eventually. I find it very annoying so I usually turn off auto-save and just save when I’ve got enough done to make it worthwhile. Just a thought.
Are you working on a Dell computer? My Dell at work used to just freeze-up for no reason. Dell put out a patch to fix the problem. Look on the Dell web site to find the fix.