Re: scroll lock key

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "MGauthier"  on Tue, 3 May 2005
01:11:30 -0500


> It did work. The first and easiest suggestion was successful (Fn+F11).

Fn-F12!! Fn-F11 is the NumLock on the Qosmio.

> Is "scroll lock" that defunct??

Not really. More like "useless". Nobody has a clue what to do with it.
Plus, notebooks have small keyboards -- your machine has 85 keys. So they
economize with that "Fn" key, which is damn hard to use. I always plug in an
external keyboard, with full-size numpad etc. XyWrite struggles with little
keyboards too; unless you're very adept at holding down three or four keys at
once, and can figure out the logic of how to use the Fn key in combination with
Shift and numlock and everything else, you lose about 1/3 of your potential key
combos. Notebooks are great for portability (and for the past five years or
so, notebooks are the only thing I buy), but in most other respects they're
inferior: slower, costlier, fewer ports for attaching peripherals, less
powerful, far more susceptible to failure (due to miniaturization and the bump
and grind of schlepping them) and far less easy to fix. I have an absolute
spiderweb of peripherals hanging off my notebooks: a real monitor, 104-key
keyboard, floppy drive, memory keys, firewire external drive, DVD burners,
optical mouse, several scanners, analog-to-digital video converter -- so much
junk, in fact, that I need a docking station just to accommodate it all. The
last time I used a notebook keyboard was, well, maybe five years ago, for five
minutes. My fingers were bewildered.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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