Dizzy Thinks: Problem with Excel? Work that wrist!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Quite possibly the funniest workaround offered by Microsoft ever.

Click Image for Readable Version

IanVisits said...: Actually, I'm quite glad you pointed that out.

If I am highlighting a large block of text and need to scroll up/down while holding shift, I have noticed that wiggling the mouse side to side speeds up the scrolling.

I often wondered why.
Anonymous said...: Ian, that's something different.

With mouse-operated scrolling, the text will jump a few lines every half-second while the mouse button is held down, and will move up further as you move the mouse up. Wiggling the cursor at the top of the screen counts as mouse movement, for the purpose of faster scrolling speed.

Dizzy's blog post was about multi-tasking in the operating system.

If, for example, you're compressing a video, it will need every bit of CPU time you can give it, and still take an hour or more to complete. Meanwhile, you want to access the web, and you want your mouse to remain responsive.

The operating system should automatically set the video editor to run at a lower priority, so other programs can cut in without having to wait for it to finish. The mouse pointer should be handled in "realtime", the highest priority possible.

By the look of things, that old Microsoft program doesn't handle multi-tasking very well. If it gets interrupted, perhaps even by the mouse pointer handler, it's so badly written that it can't pick up where it left off, and so it craps out.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009