Not wanting to hijack someone else’s pit thread, I have decided to devote an entire thread to another blasted key on some keyboards- the start key. For those unfamiliar, the ‘start’ key on some windoze keyboards brings up the start menu on the taskbar. This may be all well and good when you are navigating or want to bring up something quickly (like the calculator or paint or something).
However, when you are playing a GAME, this is a huge pain in the ass. See, the start key is alarmingly close to the shift, control, and ‘z’ keys, all of which get pressed frequently in the FPS games my friends and I play. I’ll mean to push the ‘z’ key, and my finger will slip and hit the start key, causing the game to TASK OUT, and since the game is gobbling up 99.9% of the processor, makes tasking back IN to the game incredibly slow. And of course, when I get back into the game, I suddenly find my guy’s feet sticking out from under a Tiger tank, seemingly materialized out of nowhere like some twisted version of The Wizard of Oz (all it needs is my guy’s feet to curl and retreat under the tank :eek: ).
Yeah, they put the Start key in an area that’s easy to get to, as if you’d want to use it regularly while touch-typing. Since you would normally just use the mouse to get to “Start,” that’s really pointless. It should be up there with Scroll Lock and Pause/Break.
Hey, I LOVE that start key (I actually think it’s called the “windows” key), you get lots of nifty shortcuts with it, like win + E for bringing up the windows explorer, win + D/M for minimising all windows, and win up enter right enter for shutdown.
I likes it!
I think there’s some utility that can disable the key, and some of the newer games are smart enough to disable the key themselves.
Bah, you and your easy hardware solutions. Give me a complicated software solution, preferably involving downloading a program, editing the registry, and rebooting a couple times. And it should take at least an hour.
And it should get reset to the default condition every time you get an OS patch. Even better, every time you get a new definitions file for your AV package.
This whole conversation reminds me of an editoral I read, I belive, in Analog. Anyway, the editor was going on about how he picked up an Easter Egg type thing for his printer that did something wacky; not really harmful, but wacky and annoying. Anyway, he just popped the disc with the software and drivers in and reinstalled. Boom, problem gone and no more than 30 minutes from finding the problem to fixing it. He said that he then googled for the problem and saw that people did just about what I said: they manipulated the registry and some other things. Total time for them to do it was a lot longer and more difficult.
Anyway, he had some larger point about the whole thing, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was. Maybe I can find it online if Analog has the editorials available.
I had the same problem and hated it. You can disable those windows keys using Control Panel->Keyboard. There is a third tab called, Key Settings, and you just need to disable the Left Windows, Right Windows, and Application keys. If the control panel applet doesn’t have the third tab, then you can download and install the Microsoft IntelliType Pro keyboard software from here. You don’t actually need an IntelliType Pro keyboard.
I thought TweakUI would do it too, but I can’t find the setting. Here is the XP version of TweakUI. There are versions for all of the other flavors of Windows.
I find it easier to use the Windows key in most situations than to take my hands off the keyboard, find the mouse cursor, move it over and click. Sometimes if I am going deep I’ll hit the button while I reach for the mouse so the Windows Start Menu is already open when I grab the mouse. It’s alot more effecient when I’m working with text than switching to a mouse in the middle of things.
Since I’m the only geek in the family, I’ll sometimes get a call for computer help. I haven’t used Windows in years, so I try to redirect them. But if they ask me how to turn off the computer, I tell 'em “See that key with the Windows logo on your keyboard? Hit it. Now hit U, then hit Enter.” Saves me a lot of headache.
And as far as cordless mice go: I like the concept, but I lose my remote controls often enough. I’d be seriously, seriously pissed if I lost my mouse.
We have two Microsoft optical mouses, and both of them have started doing weird shit with clicking. One of them double-clicks on a single click, and the other ignores the click. Once they’ve slipped into this mode, we have to reboot to straighten them out. Googling, we found others who had these sorts of problems with them. I like not having the ball, but I don’t like the weirdness.
