Wrestling with a new computer

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just bought an MS Surface Pro 3. With an external mouse and keyboard. And Win 8.1. First complaint: no insert key on the keyboard. And apparently no workaround. Much more serious: To get F1-F12, you have to press the Fn key. Searching online, I discovered that Fn+Caps locks the F keys (actually that is a toggle). This would have been a deal-breaker since I use the F keys heavily in my editor. And how often do I want to change the volume or change the brightness of the screen. I also was able to turn off the touch screen since I kept hitting it when using the F keys. Now it does not react to touch. I was able to program my editor to toggle insert/overstrike modes so that is now working. My son tells me that Word does not have an overstrike mode. I have never used (and will never use) Word so I don’t care.

But the good news is that all my newly installed programs are working just fine and I think I have tamed the beast. Some day I might put in the classic interface, but I never much used the start menu anyway.

2

People still use overstrike mode? :eek: Never mind Word, Notepad doesn’t have it! I thought the Insert key had become about as useless as SysReq and Scroll Lock.

3

Your son is wrong.

4

Of course they do. There are plenty of times there’s a need to edit a text document with fixed length lines. Using insert mode screws that up.

5

I still use overstrike. I never have to but it is about convenience, not necessity. I could chisel my stuff into stone, but I don’t want to. Besides, how hard would it have been to make some key combo do it? I have assigned it to alt-\ in my editor. But killing the F keys was a real loser (that they did eventually fix). One other point I didn’t mention is that the mouse has replaced the scroll wheel with a kind of touch mechanism that really doesn’t work. I have to turn both the touch screen and touch pad off because of unintended consequences of random brushes against them.

6

Perhaps you should have bought a laptop instead of an expensive tablet that you won’t use as one.

7

Yeah, this thread is odd. You could have gotten a non-touch screen laptop (including an insert key!) for probably 60% of the cost with the same specs as a Surface Pro 3. Turning off the touch screen on that machine really makes no sense to me.

Also, Word 2003 has overstrike mode. So does Excel 2010. Those are the Microsoft products I have handy right now.

8

Word 2013 has it, but it is disabled by default. You have to go into options and select it. Screenshot: http://s3.postimg.org/5mg5yj8gz/insert.jpg