A few days ago my 7-year-old Macintosh G4 finally crapped out on me, so I went to Wal-Mart and picked up a cheap eMachines Windows XP box to tide me over until my new Mac arrives (I’d been meaning to buy a Windows box as a second computer anyway, so this was an opportune time).
I’m not having any trouble using XP (I see they’ve fixed that thing where the mouse pointer leaps around the screen at silly speeds), but I do have a trivial question or two:
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Is there a way to turn off some of these pointless notifications that pop up in little balloons down by the Taskbar? I suppose some of these are important notices, but I really don’t need my computer to tell me that I just plugged headphones into the headphone jack. I know that already because I just did it
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Is there a simple keyboard shortcut that will make the cursor jump to the beginning or end of a line of text? This is something I do quite often, and I can’t see how to do it. On a Mac I have these shortcuts:
<command+left arrow> - jump to beginning of line
<command+right arrow> - jump to end of line
<command+up arrow> - jump to top of document
<command+down arrow> - jump to end of document
I’m getting a bit frustrated having to reach for the mouse to manually position the cursor where I want it.
On the plus side, I just discovered that this XP box recognizes and can use the Adesso ergonomic split keyboard I use with my Mac. I’ve been using these ergonomic keyboards ever since I got my first computer back in '96, and I was about to pound the cheap, standard, eMachines keyboard into plastic fragments. It worked fine, but it just felt wrong, like any other standard keyboard feels to me. It forced my wrists inward, and I had to actually look at my fingers when I typed because I could never tell if they were on the right keys. So I unplugged it an plugged the Adesso in, and whaddayaknow, it works.
