F9 This!
An odd issue ye ol Princess stumbled across this afternoon I wanted to share with you, dear reader. Not because I do in fact, find it strange and interesting, but because I hope you can shed some light on this one?
The Old Timer and I were taking a lovely stroll through the hallways and a user stopped us with the issue in question. It sounded simple enough, so sure, let?s go take a looksee and be on about our day. The user wants one of the function keys to act as a shortcut for a command line window. Smooth. I can handle that. No so fast, lil Miss Fix IT! After about 15 minutes of trying to figure this simple task out, I was beginning to worry. I didn?t want to resort to a hacked workaround, especially when I stated, ?So, I can get it to work on F12?how?s that?? His response, with a smile, was ?Sure, F9 would be great!? Oh no pressure, no pressure at all! I knew he was joking, but he was right. He wanted something specific to work for him and it?s my job to find out the solution. So here we go?
The problem is this?.the shortcut portion of the properties window will not accept F9 and even if acceptable, F12 no longer functions properly. Hmmm quite the head scratcher as there are no open programs or windows to dictate why F9 or F12 are not acceptable choices. After much thinking and quite a bit of laughter between The Old Timer and I, we decided to reboot. Rebooting has served us well over the course of our IT years, but we did it out of entertainment more than anything. Upon rebooting, I was now able to input F9 in the proper field and alas, it worked! I can?t explain why a shortcut would need a reboot, especially on a XP system, but hey, things like this happen from time to time with computers. So here?s a shortcut that will now function, but if copied or altered in any way, it ceases to care what I tell it to do. Get this?I renamed the shortcut, but it would no longer work. Why would renaming a shortcut have that kind of effect? I wasn?t renaming a program executable here, it?s just a shortcut! We soon discovered that in order to get the renamed shortcut to function again, we had to reboot! What the fuck? All that being said, the user now has the functionality he was searching for and a shortcut named, ?F9 Me!? It?s a good thing I wasn?t more creative with my naming scheme, eh?
Comments
Ah, but that's easy. What you do is the following
1) Create a shortcut ON THE DESKTOP. This is windows - things don't work just any old place
2) Assign the shortcut key
3) Try the shortcut at least once.
4) Move the shortcut out of the way, or in the quicklaunch bar. Done.
You hear that sound? That's the red cape swooshing ;)
Posted by: groby | March 12, 2004 12:16 PM
Not so fast Caper...
The shortcut was always on the desktop (as shortcuts will only work a select few places by default), so that doesn't explain this particular issue and testing something out once does not properly ensure it's functionality. You should know better than that ;)
BTW the shortcut does work, my curiosity is set on why rebooting was necessary when changing anything as insignificant as the name, etc.
Posted by: Princess | March 12, 2004 1:10 PM
Dude, she totally called you on a premature SWOOOSH.
Posted by: vince | March 12, 2004 1:44 PM
Read my lips. Or keypresses, in fact. I said "CREATE". Not "use an old one". Any shortcut modified in any form whatsoever after creating will not take shortcut keys without a reboot. Or reassigning them. I.e., after the rename, assign to F6, close props, start, close program, reassign to F9.
It's more a case of premature un-swooshing, I'd say....
Posted by: groby | March 12, 2004 2:41 PM
Yes, that was tried on multiple occasions as well, regardless if it were a newly created shortcut, copied or previously created, the same problems existed.
You got somethin else ya wanna throw my way Caper? ;)
Posted by: Princess | March 12, 2004 3:50 PM
DAMN! DOUBLE SWOOOOOSH DIS!
PLAYER ONE IS ON FIRE!
Posted by: vince | March 12, 2004 5:39 PM