14 replies to this topic

[NNNOOOOOO]

What does my "Turbo" button do? I only had 1 PC that had a Turbo feature, but the button didn't do anything. If I wanted to use that function, I had to use the button in the PC its self. That PC is where my keyboard came from. My keyboard also has a "Power", "Sleep" and "Wakeup" button, which does work (power - turn off the PC, sleep - hibernate, wakeup - puts PC out of stand-by mode/screensaver).

[rpgsearcherz]

As odd as it is, this is all new information to me. I've never even wondered what they were before so I never messed with them. It's interesting to see some of the replies though -- especially the system properties one.

[rvalkass]

NNNOOOOOO, on 23 July 2010 - 08:09 PM, said:

What does my "Turbo" button do? I only had 1 PC that had a Turbo feature, but the button didn't do anything. If I wanted to use that function, I had to use the button in the PC its self.

The Turbo button was a form of automated overclocking, or sometimes confusingly, underclocking. They worked by either boosting the clock speed, so that the PC ran faster, in the same way people overclock their PC today, or by slowing it down or disabling the processor's cache. The overclocking has an obvious advantage - to make your PC run faster, although hotter (hence why it wasn't left on all the time). The underclocking was necessary for games that used the processor clock speed for timing. As processors got faster, so did these old games, making them impossible to play. Slowing the processor down made the games playable on newer hardware.

[inea]

The usual name for some keyboards is the us format with unused keys. Maybe these keys are ment in this description.

Edited by inea, 15 September 2010 - 02:27 PM.

[vhortex]

Break or pause break - used when you are on command shell or the DOS prompt, this is similar to the bash shell for Linux. Break will signal a shell command/program to stop and halt while Pause Break will either 'Pause' or 'Resume from a Pause'. This buttons are useless now on computers that uses newer operating systems or those that ignore the key.

Scroll Lock - is an ancient button predating to the time when the first mouse was used on text base GUI (graphic user interface) system. The most basic function it serves was to prevent the scroll bars on the right side of this text GUI system from moving up and down (scrolling) when you move your mouse.

The alternate use of this key is when you work on Linux/Unix and you are reading a long manual file invoke by "man command name". This will enable the user to stop the automatic scrolling of text and instead will offer him to scroll up or scroll down. On windows machine this button is totally useless 90% of the time.