num lock light works

[theed]

What the hell is up with this? My dual 450 tower now has a num lock light that lights up. To the best of my knowledge the key still simply sends a keystroke (clear) it just happens to toggle. It's state makes no difference in number pad usage, is it there so that we mac users are once again "compatible" with everyone else?

Right now all the light does is let me know if I've hit clear an even or odd number of times since the last boot. It seems like a really worthless feature, but at least it's hardware accelerated so that it won't bog down my system. ;-)

[davidbrit2]

Heh, that's pretty amusing. But what about scroll lock? Why did they neglect the light that was useless to begin with? ;-) (And don't get me started on SysRq. What the heck is that thing?)

[theed]

Speaking of worthless vestiges of dead "technology," how many computers still in use have a TURBO button on the front? Even if it was wired in and worked, how many people would opt to "Push here for added suck."

Anyway, has anyone else noticed the new conventions of use for the home, end, page up and page down keys? They seem to be fully supported, and their use is in moving point of view but not your insertion point (cursor.) Right delete works pretty consistently too.

As for the scroll lock light, there are holes in the keyboard circuit board and space in the sheel for the LED to be inserted, it's just not there. (under F14) It looks they they were considering putting it in. I'm thinking about tearing my keyboard apart and testing to see if there are wires and voltage to that space. How far did they go?

[davidbrit2]

Yeah, that turbo button concept bit the dust around the 486 era. It was nice for when I would try and run those cool old CGA games that had no speed throttling, so they would be too fast to play on a 20 MHz 486 (if you can imagine that.) But don't some of the G3 Power Books have an energy saving option to reduce CPU speed? I seem to recall that you can cripple the thing down to 33 MHz, or something like that.

[theed]

Yes indeed, the powerbooks have an option to increase suck for the sake of battery life, but it's in software, where it should be. :-) I also use it to make WarCraft 2 playable, otherwise I keep scrolling to the end of the universe.

In the meanwhile, I've physically removed my caps lock and help keys. Any thoughts on these keys being software disableable? Maybe they could be disabled when I have the num lock on. :-)

[davidbrit2]

I think the Battle.net edition of Warcraft II toned down the scrolling speed a bit. It also added some nifty features that make it worth the small price.
I would have to agree with you on that Help key. If I had a nickel for every time I over did a reach for the delete key...