Pause / Break

[MrPlankton]

Hit it twice and kvm to the next machine...

MrPlankton

[Chris Maunder]

You know how there are way less BSOD's in the latest versions of Windows? It's because the Break key has been disabled. Took 'em a while to find that one, but the managed to sort out why things were breaking in the end. Hitting Alt+Break/Pause will enable the Pause function which was used to pause the computer's active processes and allow the PC's coal chute to be refilled. It's not been in use in a long, long time.

cheers, Chris Maunder

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[Nirav Doshi]

When they're at it, they should disable all the keys and we can have a BSOD-free Windows(R)! ;-)

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[nivlekio]

You can remap keys on a keyboard????? how do you do that?

[luke_g]

I actually consider it to be even more intuitive to think of it as "Windows+Break", since so often I have to go to the System Properties screen to find out why my Windows broke! ;)

[patbob]

I suppose the more interesting question is.. who's used it for its original purpose? I have. Golly gee, those were the days. Not. Oops.. no I haven't. I forgot the original use was for teletypes. I came onto the scene after it had been already remapped for use with modems -- pressing it would cause the sending modem to switch baud rates so you could see the characters instead of gibberish.

patbob

modified on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 11:51 AM

[patbob]

Predates DOS by about a decade. At least.

patbob

[Member 96]

I've been using this utility for years: http://www.randyrants.com/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html[^] It's all ultimately done in the registry but the utility makes it easy.

---

"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson

[Marc Clifton]

patbob wrote:

Predates DOS by about a decade. At least.

What? There was life before DOS? Marc

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[MikMit]

Don't push it!!! It makes time stop for an indeterminate ... er ... period. (Of course, how would we know and why would we care?) It has also been known to cause everyone within the reach of your LAN to break wind.

[Trevortni]

It causes geeks to take a break from what they're doing and reminisce about days of yore, when the key was actually used for something. Personally, it (along with Ctrl) was perhaps the most common key combination I used during my gw-basic/QBasic programming days. It would interrupt the execution of a program so that you could do debugging stuff. Those were the days....

[Wasserspeier]

Many games use that to pause the game and some debuggers and DOS programs respond to ctrl + Break (or ctrl + Break, Break).

[firegryphon]

I'd hate your keyboard. How else am I supposed to pause fortran screen output without writing something in there? I'd never know how close to the convergence tolerance I am at any point in time with a specific solution. The key that I've forgotten about completely is SysRq. Not even a foggiest of notions of what it does anymore.

[Lublenok]

The break key also comes in handy when you want to stop building your project/solution in Visual Studio. Just press CTRL+Break, and the build will stop. Sometimes a build may take too long, especially when there is also code analysis running. If you realize, you don't actually need to build, you can use this key combination to stop the build.

[Lublenok]

This break key also comes in handy when you want to stop building your project/solution in Visual Studio. Just press CTRL+Break, and the build will stop. Sometimes a build may take too long, especially when there is also code analysis running. If you realize, you don't actually need to build, you can use this key combination to stop the build.

[Nick Higgs]

I've mapped it to the Play / Pause command in Winamp.