Thats odd, are you by chance hitting the keys one after the other? The proper way to do it is to treat the windows key like you would shift or control. Example: press and hold windows key then press and release e then release windows key should bring up an explorer window open to ‘My Computer’.
For usless I gotta go with the context menu key I think.
I learned to type on an actual typewriter, and I use the numpad all the time. I don’t particularly like the Windows key, but I do use it. I just wish that they’d move it somewhere else on the keyboard. ‘Insert’ gets my vote.
I’d say it’s a dead heat between Scroll Lock and Insert.
SL has basically one useful function related to its designation, the spreadsheet thing ice1000 mentioned. Even then, it’s value is pretty limited. Any other uses are programs accessing it, not for locking a scroll, but for having an extra button around, it may as well be labeled F87 for that matter.
Insert can be used in more applications, but the default action for 99% of us is to insert, and overwriting is not at all desired. So, hitting the key is usually an anti-helpful thing. I use one program, a mainframe based set of tools, where text does not automatically wrap. There, the default is to overwrite, and inserting is optional, so the insert key has value there, but the vast majority of us don’t.
Bow before the mighty ~ key. For it is the Destructor of Objects.
The “Pause/Break” key sucks. The only time I’ve ever intentionally hit the ScrLk key was after first mistakenly hitting it.
The ‘other windows key’ is useful when your mouse doesn’t work and you have to navagate windows just by keyboard. It is a emergency key, one that you hope you never need to use, but darn glad it’s there when you need it.
Ok, fine, but then you don’t need the numbers, do you? It’s like the keyboard-mouse combo in FPSes. Just define 8 on the numpad to be forward, 9 to be forward-and-right, and so on. Civ II and III(and probably IV) do this.
While we’re talking about keyboards, I’d just like to express my hatred for non-standard keyboard layouts. Like those that contain the aforementioned Windows and Right-Click keys. Or ones with giant return keys like a reverse L, and tiny backspace keys with the pipe key where half of the backspace is supposed to be. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally inserted a bunch of ||||| into my code. Even worse is the compressed keyboards. I was stuck with on of these at my last job. The Home and End keys were no where near where they were supposed to be, and neither was the Delete key. Here at home I use a keyboard from 1985 that laid out the way God intended keyboards to be laid out.
[Spinal Tap]Our keyboards go to F13![/Spinal Tap]
I tried it again and you are correct. I was hestitating just a fraction of a second too long between holding down the Windows key and hitting the combo key.
So the Windows key is both a shortcut key and a meta-key for combos… I find that a bit irritating also. I could hold down the Ctrl or Shift key all day long and nothing happens. But I will admit it makes the key seem somewhat more useful to me than I believed it to be before.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned the most useful Windows-key shortcut: WIndows+L locks the computer, so either you enter your password to unlock it, or somebody pulls the plug. Useful if you’re in an environment where you may need to leave your computer frequently, but don’t want to leave it in a state where other people can access your stuff.
The numeric pad is very useful, as a numeric pad; I’m three or four times quicker entering numeric data (say, populating a table of prices) on the numpad than I am on the top row; the nueric pad is the one thing I really miss on my laptop. I know you can get plug-in ones, but it’s not the same.
Wow, I was just about to type the “Scroll Lock” key when I accidently found a use for it. My computing setup at work is two computers/one mouse/one keyboard through a swtich box. Normally to swtich computers I have to lean over to the switch box and press abutton. However, I just deiscovered that hitting “Scroll Lock” twice I can scroll throught the computers connected to the switch box. And then ‘Esc’ gets me out of that mode.
That’s true until you get (as I did) a job doing data-entry, with a custom-made program. Each field got ‘coded’ differently - different ways of entering names and addresses, some fields could be left blank, etc. F12 called up a nice little window that explained what do to with whatever field your cursor was in, which saved an epic amount of time. So, it’s not the most useful, but I’ve certainly used it quite a bit.
WHERE IS IT?? I think I’m an idiot because I swear I’ve used it before :smack: .
You can’t take the tilde away from us; it’s used as a separator in our account strings. But we are updating and have voted for the period instead–no shifting!!
I never noticed that button that equals right-clicking before so that’s my vote. I’ve at least seen “Pause/Break” before, usually when disengaging an accidentally hit Scroll Lock (why is my Excel acting all wonky?? #*%&$ Scroll Lock!)
My parents have still one of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey]these Gateway keyboards*. I keep meaning to get it from them and see if I can program it to get those extra asterisk and pipe/backslash keys to emulate the Windows and file keys.
PowerBook G4 here. F8 and F12 don’t seem to do anything.
F1=brightness down, F2=brightness up, F3=speaker off, F4=speaker volume down, F5=speaker volume up, F6=numlock, F7=window flip, F9 & F10=show all windows, F11=hide all windows. F1 thru F7 are marked.
Let’s try that one again. The Gateway AnyKey.
If you’re on Wiindows 2000 or XP, you should be able to do this with any keyboard, either via nasty [url=http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/input/w2kscan-map.mspx]registry editing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_AnyKey), or various pieces of software. Google ‘windows scancode’.
The pipe is typically between the backspace and the enter keys, and to the right of the square/curly bracket keys.
And it looks like scroll lock is the winnah. Other than all the function keys, unless one’s using a specific program such as WordPerfect. (I remember the mask thingers that you had to put around the function keys to help you remember what they did)
The right-click button seems to be a new invention – I don’t think I’ve seen it on non-Windows specific keyboards.
Other than those, everybody’s already gotten to the good answers.
The (possibly long and boring) story of the SysRq key.
I work on systems where not only I, but many of my users use the SysRq, Prnt Scrn, and all the function keys every day. Try running a 5250 emulation program to access an AS/400 as a terminal. All of those keys get used pretty regularly.
The original IBM PC keyboard had a one for one key correspondence for the keys on the original 5251 terminal, which was used for the System/34 and System/38 (and its later incarnations on the System/36 and the AS/400). That is, it had the same number of keys, in the same relative positions, even if some were labeled differently and had different functions normally.
IBM seems to have assumed that one of the big uses of PCs would be as terminals for these midrange boxes. And indeed, the only thing I personally used PC for during my first two or three years exposure to them in the mid 1980s was running 5250 terminal emulation. In our opinion, having grown up on midrange boxes, the little PCs simply weren’t much good for anything else.
When you started the terminal emulation program, it remapped the keyboard so that the PC keys all took the functions of the keys from 5250 keyboard that were in the same physical position. “Enter” became “Field Exit”, the right had Ctrl key became “Enter”, and so on. It was pretty easy to remember which keys did what function because they were all in the same physical spot as they were on a real terminal. This made the original PC keyboard very easy to use in emulation mode for anyone who was used to the original terminals.
But when the PC AT came out, it had a different keyboard layout than the original PC and PC XT. In an effort to help the users (at least that’s what we always assumed) IBM added labels for some of the commonly used key functions in terminal emulation programs, since the keys were no longer in the same exact positions as the keys on the real terminals.
On midrange boxes there is a specific function called System Request that you called to interrupt the current job and temporarily suspend it for various reasons; executes some command or other program then return, cancel the job, respond to a system message, etc. Depending on what you were doing, this key could get used quite a bit.
So one of the keys they added a label for on the PC AT keyboard was the System Request key, which they labeled, not to surprisingly, SysRq.
About the only reason to use it today is if you happen to be running green screen apps on an AS/400 through terminal emulation. But of you are, you are pretty much guaranteed that at some point you will use that key for its original intended purpose, to issue a system request to interrupt the current job.
I use Scroll Lock all the time. It turns on the backlight on my keyboard. Very useful for playing games at night 
As for using it for scrolling: nope, never. I’ve also never used Print Scrn/SysRq (it doesn’t print the screen on any computer I’ve ever used). The Pause key gets used by some games, but otherwise it’s just more deadwood.