num lock fail

[billgoldberg]

I had a pretty bad morning thus far.

As usual my whole family blames me for everything that goes wrong for anything computer related.

I was woken by the voice of my shouting relatives.

"I need to send an email and you broke the pc again"

The right side of the keyboard was typing random stuff, making even browsing to a site impossible.

It seemed that my mother accidentally pressed num lock (I found the answer on a linux mailing list somewhere).

Why in the hell do pressing the num lock on a netbook causes the effing letters to change?

[MikeTheC]

Keyboard overlay. Specifically, a Numeric Keypad overlay. It's there to emulate hardware you don't actually have (which you don't have for the benefit of making the keyboard smaller).

[DMcA]

yeah it's a useful feature. On my laptop all the keys on the right of the keyboard have a second function in blue which you get by pressing numlock (works in windows and linux)