Beware of Ctrl/Z with a laptop

[ParrotSlave]

The biggest blessing of Vista and Win7 is the unlimited undo feature for Freecell, which means you don't ever have to lose unless you get one of the unwinnable games. When Windows is doing stuff, like copying something to an external hd, I often play FreeCell, and, of course, occasionally have to use ctrl+z. The problem with ctrl+z is that it will undo other things besides Freecell if the cursor jumps out of the Freecell window. And if you are using a pc with that invention of Satan called a touchpad, you can very easily, unknowingly and unwittingly, make the cursor move into some other dimension. I snapped the other day when I was moving all my "downloads" and recent creations to MyDocs on an external HD, and I thought I was losing my mind when, later on, the files were not on the HD (gasp, is it a virus or what?), but then turned out to be back on the pc. I then remembered a particular freecell that required extensive undoing (translation: it was one of the hard ones), and I had used ctrl+z mindlessly, banging ctrl+z until the game went back to the beginning, several times, and I remembered that, for some reason (thank you, touchpad), it had not undone any moves sometimes, so it was undoing God knows what, in addition to unmoving my file transfers. BTW, is there a freecell for safe mode?

 

[DustSailor]

I don't recall ever seeing a post more strange than this one, if you don't mind my saying. You could always play freecell full screen or maximized.

Clicking undo in a game, is it even worth playing after that? lol

Explain how the cursor jumps out of the window? Could you keep the cursor in the window?

I found these that seem to state what you are saying, I hadn't known of this feature until now (websites found on the top lists of a google search): 5 Useful Uses Of Windows UNDO (Ctrl+Z) Shortcut and Undo In Windows 7

There are further methods of 'undoing' that function but are you sure that is something you want to do?

 

[kegobeer]

I guess you need to be more careful when you play FreeCell.

 

[seavixen32]

I really can't see the point of playing a game then undo your moves because things aren't going your way.

Defeats the object really in my view.

 

[whs]

 

[seavixen32]

We seem to have tickled your chuckle muscles, Wolfgang. I'm delighted to have played a part in cheering you up.

 

[kegobeer]

The biggest blessing of Vista and Win7 is the unlimited undo feature for Freecell

That has got to be one of the funniest things I've read in a loooooooooong time! Faster OS, more stable OS, Bitlocker, snap, shake, peek... nope. Freecell undo...yes!

 

[legacy7955]

This OP topic should end up in the Tom's Hardware news section.

 

[whs]

We seem to have tickled your chuckle muscles, Wolfgang. I'm delighted to have played a part in cheering you up.

Yeah Andrew, you guys made me laugh.

 

[MilesAhead]

This OP topic should end up in the Tom's Hardware news section.

I never owned a laptop. I thought sure this was going to be a cautionary tale about undoing stuff in Explorer, then accidentally hitting some laptop-only key that undid your last restore point or something!!

Next time I'm playing chess against Deep Blue I'll make sure to bump up my keyboard rep rate so I can control-z my ass off!!

 

[ParrotSlave]

I do not maximize the Freecell window because I am doing other things, or watching other windows. If you haven't had the issue with laptops of activating the touchpad accidentally, then you are indeed blessed, and in my case, the option for disabling it is greyed out in the properties/driver tab. See, for example, cursor jumps while typing - Microsoft Answers. There is even a free program for disabling the touchpad when you type, called TouchPad Pal, but it doesn't work all the time. It's annoying to have to be careful not to touch that area. Maybe I'm just not a delicate person. Perhaps I should find a piece of plastic to cover it with and use something sticky but not too sticky to keep it affixed until my next restoration of a good Win7 image, which is coming soon.

As far as freecell is concerned, I don't think of it as a game per se, but as a problem, as well as a little bit of mind-tuning. It has been more than 2 years since I have lost a game, but that just means I haven't run into 11982, 146692, 186216, 455889, 495505, 512118, 517776 or 781948. I do not give up: there exists a solution to almost every freecell, and I do not like losing, so I persist until I find it.

I should have put a smiley in when I joked about the undo being the best feature of Win7; I'm assuming that nobody took that seriously. Win7 is certainly better than its predecessor, the Windows Not-Responding system, oops, I misspelled Vista. It really is good: I had even bought a "real"--i.e., retail, not oem, Vista Ultimate, just to be able to get MS tech support, but even they were unable to fix all of its nightmares, after months and months of back and forth email support. I waited to upgrade to Win7 until the first sp came out, but if I had realized how nice it was, I would have abandoned Vista long ago.

The option to disable the touchpad is not in the device manager, which I have seen several people complaining about not being there, but it is on the device settings of the mouse in the control panel, put there by the Synaptics software. I had forgotten where it was, and went looking around on the internet, and found that it was "supposed" to be on a tab that comes up when you click on the properties of the touchpad in the device manager--NOT with Synaptics--and I got upset that the Synaptics software wasn't installing properly. To disable the touchpad is easy with Synaptics, you just have to know where to look for the option to do so: Control Panel/Mouse/Device Settings/[check "Disable internal pointing device when external USB pointing device is attached]. You won't lose the touchpad if your usb mouse messes up; all you have to do is unplug it.

 

[Britton30]

I thought I was OCD with Solitaire.:shock:

I do however agree that a touchpad is an alien device to wear down humankind's resistance. It is a couple notches better the "eraser" nub seen on laptops. They were as acurate as throwing a handful of sand at a bullseye.

 

[Corazon]

I'm kinda used to touchpads now...hardly even bother with a USB mouse on my laptop anymore.

What makes them so evil though is the cursed tap-to-click feature. In Windows, you need the full driver suite (usually Synaptics) just to turn it off, and if you're in any rescue environment based on WinPE you're stuck with it. I HATE THAT... Whose idea was it to have this ON by default?