I've been too ashamed to admit it until today, but the DELL Inspiron I purchased about three months ago doesn't come with a Break key. That means I can't interrupt DOS batch files.
It means too that I can't manually interrupt Word VBA programs that are processing almost 50GB of MP3 files.
Nothing beats me!
I use INI files and test the INI file to see if the program should stop; it is an arm's length implementation of a Ctrl-Break key, but writing VBA code to sample an INI file because I was too stupid to notice that there was no "break" key in the fine print on the keyboard ...
I'm not going to diatribe against GPT partitions on a 500GB drive, touch-screen technology, and Windows 8 on a laptop. Please see "Consumers" below.
I searched the web and got 8,388,607 hits that discussed this problem; the general thrust was that keyboad mappers handled two-byte codes, and Ctrl-Break was a three-byte code.
But really, in 30 years of PCs I've never even thought about not having a Ctrl-Break option. And it has to be at least a quarter-century since mapping the keyboard seemed important ("CED" anyone?)
This lunchtime I thought that at least I'd do a quick statistical survey, so back to Best Buy and scanned the laptops on display, about thirty of them lined up on glass display cases.
Roughly 50% don't have a Break key; of the 50% that do, half of them implement it in orange, that is, it is Fn-Ctrl-Break for them.
Noman, long may he be on hand at Best Buy, confirmed my findings.
"Developers are a dying breed". He shook my hand in awe when I told him I wrote in MSWord VBA (little does he know how atrocious can be my code)
And he confirmed that, of course, Best Buy is a consumer store. Noone writes programs any more; at least, not the kind of person Best Buy wants to see in their stores. I did not take that as an insult.
Here's why Noman is good: he suggested I
purchase a keyboard for $30.Now why didn't I think of that?
I was plucking up courage to blow another $400 on a laptop to replace this one, which replaced the one I loved that seemed to be overheating a bit too much ...
