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Gmax and Windows key?

JRobinson

JRobinson

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Has anyone else had their geometry get gnarled up by an inadvertent press of the "Windows key"? I've had this happen a couple times, make a jab for the ALT key to rotate the view, hit the windows key by mistake and find some selected vertices, edges or whatever have been moved several feet. Seems to happen when the mouse wheel is pressed like you do when you rotate the view.

At that point the program goes nuts, undo doesn't work and the "move" type-in shows the vertices right where they're supposed to be. I've tried to simply close gmax without saving but it gives me an "assertation failed" error (or something like that) so I have to kill gmax with the task manager. I save often enough that I haven't lost much work as a result of this, but at least one time I had to go into my autoback folder and retrieve an autosave.

Strange quirk, simple solution for me anyway was to pry the Windows key right out of the keyboard since I never use it anyway. It now lays in a pile of clutter on my desk alongside the "Insert" key, lol. The empty hole in the keyboard also makes a nice "no-look reference" for the Ctrl & Alt keys I've found :) .

Jim
 
I have had odd things happen, and had to reboot.

The really wierd one is when you try to scale something and it turns into a micro-dot. No fixing it. So you immediately close out without saving and reopen and hope that the file is fine and the part is saved.
 
That "Windows" key is the most useless bit of hardware imaginable. In the several decades of using Windows, I've never had any occasion to use it (except by accident)... :twocents:
 
Ladies and gentlemen, these are the voices of true mouseketeers, those who foreswear digital exertion in all its manifestations. A high and noble calling, and a lonely one, they deserve your unswerving admiration.

I could live without the Caps Lock, but this thread really made me chuckle. ;D
 
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On scaling, I've been rendering some AO with Xnormal and it seems to like "large things" better than "normal things" so I've been scaling everything up 1000% and exporting a model specifically for rendering AO in Xnormal.

That scaling process I've noticed, moves everything in strange directions, like Z: -58.25', Y: 104.37', etc. I can understand the Z movement but it seems like if everything is at "0" on the X and Y axes it should also be at "0" on those axes after scaling. It isn't, and the odd thing is if I open the file back up and scale it again for 2nd attempt at an Xnormal export, the stupid thing doesn't move the same amount on each axis that it did the last time I scaled it. Seems kinda random, lol.

BTW, I speculate that a Verizon wireless hotspot in N. Idaho is actually a more useless piece of hardware than the Windows key :D .

Tom Gibson, you must have the slickest bag of tricks of anyone I know! (Win-key+E) :)

Jim
 
Thanks. :)

Actually I tend to use the mouse more than the keyboard. I visited a guy last week and he used Windows E, so I learned it from him. :o
 
tgibson said:
I only use Windows/E to open Explorer...
Click to expand...

That is a great tip actually. Sometimes I prefer to have two instances of Explorer open side-by-side, which definitely makes file management much easier at times.

Back in the "Dark Ages" I used a DOS utility named "QFiler" all the time. It allowed me to have to DOS directories (even across my LANtastic network) open side-by-side for convenience in file management.

Oddly enough, I just did a google search and see that there are now versions of QFiler available for both MACs and PCs... ;)
 
Since you're using Windows 7 Bill, you may not know about some other Windows key tricks. These two Explorer windows can tile side by side on the desktop by hitting Winkey + left arrow when opening one and Winkey + right arrow when opening the other.

But if you prefer mousing, who am I to say nay? :twocents:
 
Just right click the task bar and choose "show windows side by side".

I'm not really into it myself, I'm used to clicking or dragging onto the taskbar icons. ...and trying to use ALT+Tab without turning caps lock on and off because the keys are so damn small. Hey, now that I think of it maybe the caps lock key needs to take up residence with the Windows & insert keys, I mean, how often do you use caps lock?

Jim
 
Windows key is most useful when your USB mouse fails to initiate for whatever reason and you need to perform orderly shutdown using keystrokes.

Never use it otherwise.
 
I normally use two monitors and when I lost one screen sometime some of the windows still open in the area that do not exist anymore so the windows are unvisible and unreachable via mouse.
With <Alt>-M <Space> V
I can move these windows to the position where I can reach it via mouse again.
That was the only reason to use it and I always have to look the right key-combination in google again. ;)
 
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