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I'm using a 1 year-old Asus laptop for work, study and gaming. I just discovered that the touchpad has a pretty cool feature..
Normally, I don't use the touchpad. I disabled the touchpad because it's placed in a terrible location; my left thumb lies directly onto the touchpad, causing erratic movements/clicks when typing. A mouse has so much better control anyway.
I only use the touchpad when I'm taking my laptop somewhere else to attend a lecture or seminar. And sometimes these get boring... so I mess around with the touchpad. The right and bottom edges of the touchpad allows you to scroll up/down or left/right respectively; that's a basic feature that's found in most touchpads. Today, I noticed that the icon isn't a double-ended arrow but instead a weird circle.. so that intrigued me. After messing around with my touchpad (and completely ignoring the lecture), I noticed that after activating the scroll function on the right/bottom edges, you can continuously scroll down/up by spinning circles clockwise/anticlockwise! Like one of those first gen iPods! Mind=blown.
A bit more details about this cool scroll function: The circles that you spin can be centered on any part of the touchpad, and they can be of any size. If you draw lines back and forth, then you'll scroll up and down. However, if the sensor detects that you're drawing some semblance of a circle (even a really long and thin rectangle), it'll treat it as a circle and keep scrolling in the same direction. A pretty cool feature, I must say. It comes in handy when scrolling through long documents.
My laptop's touchpad also has the multitouch features of the iPhone: pinch to zoom, place two fingers and pivot one of the to rotate the orientation of pdf files. Pretty useful features to have!
If your computer/laptop has other cool and interesting features, please share them here!
Edit: I hope I wrote this clearly.. descriptions aren't my strong suit.
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When scrolling through long documents don't you think that the center mouse button thing (both buttons at the same time on laptops) is better as you can scroll super fast and can have it auto-scroll while you read?
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did you know to scroll on a mac you just hold down 2 fingers and it will scroll up and down? I did NOT know this until someone showed me how to do it on their mac.....now I know why so many people prefer MACs to PCs
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@Madx11: Yeah I know about that. I don't use it because auto-scrolling is too distracting when I'm reading something >,<
@StateofReverie: If you do that, how do you control which direction it scrolls?
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It's probably common knowledge but most laptop keyboards have this little dimple between some of the keys which you can press in different directions to change the position of the cursor (like a mini mouse). Some people like it more than a trackpad.
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On September 25 2012 09:40 DRTnOOber wrote: It's probably common knowledge but most laptop keyboards have this little dimple between some of the keys which you can press in different directions to change the position of the cursor (like a mini mouse). Some people like it more than a trackpad. Isn't that something that's exclusive to IBM laptops?
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On our school's Dell laptops, if you mash the keys as if you're macroing during a StarCraft game while the thing is booting up, all the error beeps will be delayed until the boot and if you pull it off it'll make annoying beeping noises for almost half a minute.
This is fun to do in the middle of final exams. I don't see a practical use for it though
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On September 25 2012 10:27 [UoN]Sentinel wrote:On our school's Dell laptops, if you mash the keys as if you're macroing during a StarCraft game while the thing is booting up, all the error beeps will be delayed until the boot and if you pull it off it'll make annoying beeping noises for almost half a minute. This is fun to do in the middle of final exams. I don't see a practical use for it though Hahahahaha.. that's a pretty annoying prank. Completely throws people's focus off, when they so painstakingly got into "the zone".
Reminds me of a fun trick on Windows 98 computers. If you go Start menu -> Run -> Type in "C:\con\con", you get a BSOD. It was fun to induce random BSODs when people weren't looking.
Windows 98... geez I'm old.
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One thing I can say about laptops: Learn your hotkeys.
And I'm not talking about standard OS hotkeys. I mean stuff like volume control, wireless, monitor/display, brightness, etc. Most laptops come loaded with those extra functions.
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