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how when you use a keyboard for a long time the letters wear off or you get a
layer of finger dirt so deep you have to physically scrape your keys well if this
has ever happened to you and you don't have to admit it I'm sure that what
you've noticed is that it mostly affects the keys that you're pressing down all
the time like Eeyore enter so I'd be
willing to bet that for most of you one key that's remained more or less
pristine is scroll lock
but what the heck is scroll lock anyway
is it something people use to keep their documents secure before books were
invented sorry for that anyway we don't need to
go quite that far back for our answer but the scroll lock does hail from a
bygone era of computing these days if
you were working on a document for example you would generally reposition
the typing cursor by moving your mouse and roll the wheel to scroll up and down
the page but back before graphical
operating systems and mice were widespread people used the arrow keys on
their keyboards to move their cursors around or to scroll the page so the
scroll locks purpose was to toggle their arrow keys between scrolling when it was
on and just moving the cursor around when it was off so then is scroll lock
still relevant in the era of mice and fancy gooeys while many people and
keyboard manufacturers are clearly saying no it's not uncommon to find
keyboards without the scroll lock key but that doesn't mean that it's totally
useless some modern programs notably
Microsoft Excel still use the scroll
lock key as it was originally intended turn it off and the arrow keys will
highlight an adjacent cell but turn it on and they will scroll through the
entire worksheet which can actually be handy if you're working on a laptop and
your trackpad is terrible there's also a little-known Windows feature that makes
use of scroll lock if you modify the registry with this key then hold right
control and press scroll lock twice you'll get the blue screen of death cool
right now I'm serious this feature is included to give advanced users the
ability to look at the contents of the system's memory which are dumped to a
log file when a blue screen crash occurs finally if you've got several computers
hooked up to a KVM like in the server room here at Linus Media Group pressing
scroll lock twice then a number key will actually switch the input on most of
these types of devices however as you've
probably noticed all of these use cases
are fringe at best so these days the
most common use of the scroll lock is simply as a free key that can be
remapped for any number of other purposes some people use it to trigger a
macro or some other special function during gameplay while others use special
hotkey software that can repurpose scroll lock as a toggle between two
different virtual keyboards so if you were looking for a way to finally
achieve your life's goal of having a dedicated wingdings keyboard without
missing out on desk space for your regular one this could be the answer or
maybe an alternate Cyrillic or Mandarin
layout would make more sense there's a ton of different reasons you might want
multiple computers maybe use one as a as a coding workstation and the other one
for gaming for example but no one likes having two keyboards and two mice on the
desk it's confusing and it's cluttered well synergy solves that problem at once
and for all letting you use a single keyboard and mouse across multiple
computers even if they have different operating systems all together it works
on Windows Mac and Linux and has great
features including clipboard sharing dragging and dropping files between the
computers custom hotkeys and more
synergy is available in basic and pro versions with the latter including s
cell encryption to secure the data sent between the computers and synergy is
offering a 50% discount to Techquickie viewers all you got to do is check out
the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you dislike
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order