Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos you know how when you use a keyboard for a long time the letters wear off or you get a layer of finger dirt so deep you have to physically scrape your keys well if this has ever happened to you and you don't have to admit it I'm sure that what you've noticed is that it mostly affects the keys that you're pressing down all the time like Eeyore enter so I'd be willing to bet that for most of you one key that's remained more or less pristine is scroll lock but what the heck is scroll lock anyway is it something people use to keep their documents secure before books were invented sorry for that anyway we don't need to go quite that far back for our answer but the scroll lock does hail from a bygone era of computing these days if you were working on a document for example you would generally reposition the typing cursor by moving your mouse and roll the wheel to scroll up and down the page but back before graphical operating systems and mice were widespread people used the arrow keys on their keyboards to move their cursors around or to scroll the page so the scroll locks purpose was to toggle their arrow keys between scrolling when it was on and just moving the cursor around when it was off so then is scroll lock still relevant in the era of mice and fancy gooeys while many people and keyboard manufacturers are clearly saying no it's not uncommon to find keyboards without the scroll lock key but that doesn't mean that it's totally useless some modern programs notably Microsoft Excel still use the scroll lock key as it was originally intended turn it off and the arrow keys will highlight an adjacent cell but turn it on and they will scroll through the entire worksheet which can actually be handy if you're working on a laptop and your trackpad is terrible there's also a little-known Windows feature that makes use of scroll lock if you modify the registry with this key then hold right control and press scroll lock twice you'll get the blue screen of death cool right now I'm serious this feature is included to give advanced users the ability to look at the contents of the system's memory which are dumped to a log file when a blue screen crash occurs finally if you've got several computers hooked up to a KVM like in the server room here at Linus Media Group pressing scroll lock twice then a number key will actually switch the input on most of these types of devices however as you've probably noticed all of these use cases are fringe at best so these days the most common use of the scroll lock is simply as a free key that can be remapped for any number of other purposes some people use it to trigger a macro or some other special function during gameplay while others use special hotkey software that can repurpose scroll lock as a toggle between two different virtual keyboards so if you were looking for a way to finally achieve your life's goal of having a dedicated wingdings keyboard without missing out on desk space for your regular one this could be the answer or maybe an alternate Cyrillic or Mandarin layout would make more sense there's a ton of different reasons you might want multiple computers maybe use one as a as a coding workstation and the other one for gaming for example but no one likes having two keyboards and two mice on the desk it's confusing and it's cluttered well synergy solves that problem at once and for all letting you use a single keyboard and mouse across multiple computers even if they have different operating systems all together it works on Windows Mac and Linux and has great features including clipboard sharing dragging and dropping files between the computers custom hotkeys and more synergy is available in basic and pro versions with the latter including s cell encryption to secure the data sent between the computers and synergy is offering a 50% discount to tech quickie viewers all you got to do is check out the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed comment with video suggestions and check out our other channels I did that out of order