Hi,
A couple of years ago I noticed that, in some computers, when
the Up, Down, Left or Right keys were held pressed for several
seconds, sometimes they acted as numeric keypad keys, i.e.,
instead of just moving the cursor in these directions, they
actually *wrote* the characters 8, 2, 4 or 6 respectively.
These are *not* the numeric keypad keys, but the four-key
cluster between the alpha and the numeric keypads.
Let me state the whole thing once more, to avoid
misunderstanding.
The keys involved are not the numeric keypad keys. However,
the effect is *as if* we were using the numeric keypad arrow
keys with the NumLock feature off, and these keys, when held
pressed, would act most of the time as per NumLock off (move
the cursor), but sometimes -- say, one in 30 iterations --
would act as if NumLock was on (write digits 2, 4, 6, 8).
This is of course serious, as you may inadvertently write a
digit in your text when you merely wanted to move the cursor.
This usually happened in old computers (early Pentiums) donated
for use in my Health Center volunteer work. At the time I
thought it was some hardware fault because the machines were old
and presumably worn out.
Actually I used this as a test to evaluate if the machines were
reliable. I saw this happen in several computers, and still have
one of those. All tests were done with pure FreeDOS.
One trick that apparently eliminates the problem completely is
keeping NumLock off. (This may sound odd, because NumLock is
supposed to change the behaviour of the numeric keypad keys,
whereas we are talking about the other arrow keys here.)
Because this is a keyboard issue, I (rather vaguely) remember
trying MKEYB.EXE by Tom Ehlert instead of the standard FreeDOS
KEYB.EXE, but the problem remained.
Today, however, for the first time, the same problem happened
with my own computer -- a machine I have been using intensively
for over a year, and which so far has been completely reliable.
An old text editor was running which requires reducing processor
speed because of the Borland runtime 200 bug. I use Eric's FDAPM
to reduce the speed. The problem was exactly the same as
described above, and it also disappeared when the NumLock
feature is off. It also disappeared when the processor was
returned to its full speed (1 GHz).
So perhaps it is not a hardware fault of old computers, but some
other issue. As I never had this happen with MS-DOS which I used
from 1995 to 2007, I thought it might be a FreeDOS issue.
On a side note, when I started running the Health Center
database in a network 2 years ago, with all machines running
FreeDOS, a problem arose which *also* involved keeping the Up,
Down, Left or Right keys pressed for a few seconds in the client
machines. The effect was that the whole network crashed.
I mention the network problem just because it was also triggered
by keeping the same keys pressed. I discussed the issue in our
list, and several people responded. The solution was to run
MS-DOS in the server. Clients continued to run FreeDOS, and the
problem never came up again. It seemed that the problem was
related to running FreeDOS in a network.
In today's issue, there is no network involved. This is a
standalone machine I use at home as my main computer, and it has
been very reliable so far. I also run Puppy Linux and Seamonkey
or Nightly in it to browse the web. So apparently it is not a
hardware problem.
Has anyone experienced anything like that? Any idea what it
might be?
Regards,
Marcos
--------------------------------------
Marcos Fávero Florence de Barros
Campinas, Brazil
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