- TL;DR
- What hacks have you used to bypass UI problems? Are there better solutions?
With Win7 and Win10 laptops, the UI has some serious issues, IMO. I've had several work and personal laptops with super sensitive touchpads, and lately the Num Lock key has proved problematic.
On my older laptops, I was able to use the Control Panel to disable the touchpad so that it would not send me off into oblivion when my palm brushed it, but with the latest Windows operating systems that does not seem to be an option. I can turn down the touchpad sensitivity, but even at the minimum setting, I still end up vectoring off to the corners of my document and deleting random text (which is really time consuming to recover from) if my palm brushes the dang touchpad.
And having the Num Lock key right next to the Backspace key seems like a poor keyboard design to me, since a slight overstep on Backspace can disable the Num Lock, which then results in you vectoring off into hyperspace the next time you try to type a number, and can also result in random deletions of text in a document that you are working on.
At least on my HP laptop I can mouse down to the status bar to see if my NumLock is still turned on, but on my wife's work laptop (she is working from home) we have not been able to find such a status indicator.
So, I've "engineered" some workaround physical hacks for now (ESD pads over the touchpads and keyboard guards over the problematic NumLock key). But there has to be a better way. A coworker suggests that there is a Bios disable for the touchpad thing, but I haven't tried that path yet...
On my older laptops, I was able to use the Control Panel to disable the touchpad so that it would not send me off into oblivion when my palm brushed it, but with the latest Windows operating systems that does not seem to be an option. I can turn down the touchpad sensitivity, but even at the minimum setting, I still end up vectoring off to the corners of my document and deleting random text (which is really time consuming to recover from) if my palm brushes the dang touchpad.
And having the Num Lock key right next to the Backspace key seems like a poor keyboard design to me, since a slight overstep on Backspace can disable the Num Lock, which then results in you vectoring off into hyperspace the next time you try to type a number, and can also result in random deletions of text in a document that you are working on.
At least on my HP laptop I can mouse down to the status bar to see if my NumLock is still turned on, but on my wife's work laptop (she is working from home) we have not been able to find such a status indicator.
So, I've "engineered" some workaround physical hacks for now (ESD pads over the touchpads and keyboard guards over the problematic NumLock key). But there has to be a better way. A coworker suggests that there is a Bios disable for the touchpad thing, but I haven't tried that path yet...
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Oh, one more thing, my Wife has an HP laptop, but I'm not allowed close to it,
. 