Redneck Hillbilly Search

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Sticky Keys

Ever wanted to throw your computer out a window? Smash it into a million-billion-trillion pieces?  Then you know how I felt yesterday after hours of tinkerin away on the Mr.'s laptop.

He had a sticky O key - not just a key that is hard to press, or stays down, but a key that repeats when you don't want it to, hundreds - if not thousands - of times in any possible way it can.

Open an Internet Explorer window and it would fill up the address bar with ooooooooooooooo's so fast you couldn't erase them in time to input what you wanted. Surprise! There actually are search results with a hundred o's! Who'da thunk it?

Click on File in ANY application and it would automatically try to  Open , or switch On or Off. Want to save a file? It'll be named "oooooooooooooo" or similar.  Open  a text document and your screen will be filled with.... you guessed it  .... o's!

And the kicker? The Joy of all joys - if there wasn't an open area for o's to be input it would error continuously. You know what I'm sayin'? Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep - between the Ooooo's and the BeepBeeps  it was nearly drivin me CRAZY. Mute only solved the problem temporarily - if you wanted sound you were hooped. Or perhaps I should say "hooooooooped" ;p

The Mr. pryed off the bad key and ripped out everythin remotely related to the o key and yet the problem remained. How is that possible? There's a problem in there somewhere that only a new onboard keyboard, a usb keyboard, or a hammer can rectify.

Want to shut down? Apparently the "O" key is for lOck ;p. That's just lovely. Want to visit a site in your favorites? Well you can't, because "o" only lets you Organize.

My temporary solution was to disable the "o" key with a nifty solution called SharpKeys found at http://www.randyrants.com/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html  It can remap any key on your keyboard to any other key, or disable a key completely. Apparently useful for people who can't stand the caps lock key when playin online.  Wonderful! I could have chosen to use one of my arrow keys or whichever key I never use but this works for now.

Since there are now other keys startin to FRY on the keyboard ( littlest chitlin spilled hot chocolate on it many months back) I enabled the onscreen keyboard in Vista's  Control Panel - Ease of Use so we can at least use the mouse to click letters and somehow input information where we need it. Very handy in situations like this one. 

Stupid, Stupid Computers!
:O !!