Flutterby™! : Vista question 2009-01-27 00:22:55.943301+00

Vista question

2009-01-27 00:22:55.943301+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Stupid question: When I hit the caps-lock key on my new Vista box, I get a little status window on the lower right of the screen showing my shift-lock status. How the heck do I get rid of that annoying thing?

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-27 01:27:33.205262+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

I don't have that feature. Must be in Microsoft Windows Vista Extra Annoying Edition™.

Ya know - the only thing worse that Vista (or XP) is the crap that the hardware vendors pile on top.

When I got my new HP last year, I stripped off everything I could. I also sold the RF wireless keyboard and mouse on eBay and bought an IBM M-model "boat anchor" and Logitech mouse.

I found out a sad thing while looking for my IBM keyboard: the M-model keyboards don't work with most USB-PS/2 adapters. So, if I end up with a computer lacking a PS/2 keyboard port, I may have to drop $80 on a proper adapter.

I may also need to reformat the machine soon. Turns out the USGS is changing VPN providers and they claim they don't support Vista. So sometime in the next couple months I'll spend the better part of a week setting up my machine on a fresh install of XP.

That's weird, because I've used (and am still using) a Model M keyboard via a USB-PS/2 adapter (through a Belkin KVM no less!) with no problems whatsoever. Hmm ... perhaps the Belkin is doing some translations?

My experience with Belkin and firmware revisions is that two of the identical case may be different in many ways.

But in the good news, my latest computer does have a PS/2 keyboard port, so apparently they're still seen as a good thing.

Aha! It's a process called "ModLEDKey.exe". So I pop up Regedit, search the entire registro for "ModLEDKey", get nothing. It's not in my Startup menu. I've just renamed it in the hopes that it'll not get run next time, but the really disturbing thing is that there used to be only 5 or 6 completely different ways for processes to get run on Windows startup. So finding and disabling viruses was often just a matter of discovering which of the various mechanisms the virus had managed to insinuate itself into.

Now it appears that Vista has further upped the number of ways a virus can hide itself.

Oh, and it used to be that there was useful information when you searched on process names in Google. Now the top hits are all badly spelled sites with form information for the process name claiming that I can fix my problems by downloading missing DLLs from them. Uh. Yeah.