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WardXmodem
Technical User
I am a keyboard fan.
I once attended a class and finished the lab in half time because I used the keyboard, not the mouse like the rest of the class, haha.
XP supports keyboard shortcuts in your start menu, by going to properties and pressing a key, with ctrl-alt appended, so for example ctrl-alt-M to bring up MS-DOS (CMD).
Well, I implemented nearly all of them over the years - so I could launch programs with a 3-key combo instead of the horrific start menu tree (which I understand is actually - gasp - improved in Vista by allowing searches -- which I implemented in my own shell years ago).
_______
[Time passes]
I noticed eventually, that my system would have explorer (the "shell", not the internet browser) "hang" for TEN SECONDS, at times.
In other words, when I moved the mouse down to the place you would to increase or decrease the # of lines in the task area, it would switch to a double arrow (that's OK) but CONTINUE to be a double arrow as I moved PAST down into the task area such as to select some other program.
After a while, I realized this 10 second hang was happening a lot, and I fired up the wonderful "filemon" to see what was happening.
What I found, was XP has a design flaw - it doesn't scan through the start menu tree for all shortcut keys (a small amount of data to store) at startup! Instead it is threading its way through all the entries (and if you're a nut like me who installs tons of stuff...) just took too long. Admittedly if you used one shortcut soon enough after another, your disk cache would make it zip through, but after say 20 minutes of computer use the disk cache no longer had the start menu tree.
My solution was to REMOVE all the keyboard shortcuts, and instead implement them UNCHANGED (ctrl-alt-M brings up cmd) using Macro Express, a simply WONDERFUL program for automating XP. (I also use AutoIT3, but M.E. can catch keystrokes, while AutoIT isn't quite designed to do that).
Ref:
I appreciate any further comments, etc.
I once attended a class and finished the lab in half time because I used the keyboard, not the mouse like the rest of the class, haha.
XP supports keyboard shortcuts in your start menu, by going to properties and pressing a key, with ctrl-alt appended, so for example ctrl-alt-M to bring up MS-DOS (CMD).
Well, I implemented nearly all of them over the years - so I could launch programs with a 3-key combo instead of the horrific start menu tree (which I understand is actually - gasp - improved in Vista by allowing searches -- which I implemented in my own shell years ago).
_______
[Time passes]
I noticed eventually, that my system would have explorer (the "shell", not the internet browser) "hang" for TEN SECONDS, at times.
In other words, when I moved the mouse down to the place you would to increase or decrease the # of lines in the task area, it would switch to a double arrow (that's OK) but CONTINUE to be a double arrow as I moved PAST down into the task area such as to select some other program.
After a while, I realized this 10 second hang was happening a lot, and I fired up the wonderful "filemon" to see what was happening.
What I found, was XP has a design flaw - it doesn't scan through the start menu tree for all shortcut keys (a small amount of data to store) at startup! Instead it is threading its way through all the entries (and if you're a nut like me who installs tons of stuff...) just took too long. Admittedly if you used one shortcut soon enough after another, your disk cache would make it zip through, but after say 20 minutes of computer use the disk cache no longer had the start menu tree.
My solution was to REMOVE all the keyboard shortcuts, and instead implement them UNCHANGED (ctrl-alt-M brings up cmd) using Macro Express, a simply WONDERFUL program for automating XP. (I also use AutoIT3, but M.E. can catch keystrokes, while AutoIT isn't quite designed to do that).
Ref:
I appreciate any further comments, etc.