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Okay for those that do not get it. 1. It’s a bank. 2. Banks lock down their computers. 3. So you cannot install other software to fix this in software. 4. You

Okay for those that do not get it. 1. It’s a bank. 2. Banks lock down their computers. 3. So you cannot install other software to fix this in software. 4. You do not have access to the system low enough to rename / remove the winhelp.exe crap. 5. No 3rd party hardware is allowed in the bank. So no bringing your own keyboard. All the time we get into this threads on HN where the techie goes well you could just...bla bla bla. In the real would of corporate IT everything you say is a non-starter.

lkbm 9y ago
Oh wow, I never even thought of messing with winhelp.exe. Luckily, I was able to remap F1 at my job, so it was fine. :-)
emodendroket 9y ago
Besides all that... it seems like this is an easier fix. Don't a lot of computer gamers remove their Windows keys for similar reasons?
- devopsproject 9y ago
  yes. you can also ahk it or get a keyboard with a winkey kill switch
turblety 9y ago
Exactly this. Could not have said it better myself. Even trying to sort this stuff out properly could cost your department millions of pounds due to bureaucracy and incompetent management.
mfoy_ 9y ago
The greater point is that if you put something really useful next to something really annoying it will exacerbate the issue. F1 should not be so bad, and it should not be so close to F2. Even just leaving alone how bad, and utterly useless, the help dialogues in Windows are it's just terrible UX design. It would be like having a "eject engine block" button next to the "start car" button. One day you're going to hit it instead of the one you meant... Annoying / dangerous UI controls should be kept out of the way of the more common features.
- zem 9y ago
  one thing that boggles me about the firefox dev team is their continuing refusal to add a "disable ctrl-Q" setting. it's right next to ctrl-W and in my firefox using days i accidentally hit it a ton of times.
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    You might like one of the add-ons that disable Ctrl-Q.
    - Supersonic112 9y ago
      There used to be one such Firefox addon that even made it into the Debian (Wheezy/Jessie) repositories. Unfortunately it was written for the old plugin system and never updated and is now designated as blocking the new Firefox multiprocessing, so I already started looking into Firefox addon programming just to replace it. Somehow I never thought about looking for newer alternatives in the official addon store, where several modern ones seem to exist already, so I'd like to thank you a lot for your suggestion.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Chrome used to "honor" the backspace key means navigate backwards so much that if you hit tab (changed focus) while typing a textbox then hit backspace it would nav back and lose all your text. Made me cry so many times.
- ytjohn 9y ago
  With several versions of windows, I learned to hate how close Help was to Run on the start menu. You're about to run cmd or some specific program, and then next thing you know, your computer is crawling to a halt while it attempts to bring up and display the help ui. Solvable with keyboard shortcuts or creating a shortcut to cmd somewhere else, but still happened enough to be infuriating. In most cases, it was when I was doing work on someone else's computer.
- mjlee 9y ago
  My favourite example of this is from the Apollo command module. Margaret Hamilton (one of the programmers) had her daughter in the simulator and let her play around. She managed to crash the simulator by launching a certain programme midflight. Margaret wanted to stop this from being possible, but was overruled because astronauts don't make mistakes. Eventually one of the astronauts made that exact mistake during the Apollo 8 flight. Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/
riphay 9y ago
Former banker, and to this day I remove the F1 key from my keyboards because I still use excel heavily. Never really crossed my mind to remove winhelp.exe or anything else. This was a simple solution to a simple problem, didn't need anything more complicated. And if I ever need to access the help function, I'd just stick a pen in the socket and hit the membrane.

lkbm 9y ago

Oh wow, I never even thought of messing with winhelp.exe. Luckily, I was able to remap F1 at my job, so it was fine. :-)

emodendroket 9y ago

Besides all that... it seems like this is an easier fix. Don't a lot of computer gamers remove their Windows keys for similar reasons?

devopsproject 9y ago
yes. you can also ahk it or get a keyboard with a winkey kill switch

turblety 9y ago

Exactly this. Could not have said it better myself. Even trying to sort this stuff out properly could cost your department millions of pounds due to bureaucracy and incompetent management.

mfoy_ 9y ago

The greater point is that if you put something really useful next to something really annoying it will exacerbate the issue. F1 should not be so bad, and it should not be so close to F2. Even just leaving alone how bad, and utterly useless, the help dialogues in Windows are it's just terrible UX design. It would be like having a "eject engine block" button next to the "start car" button. One day you're going to hit it instead of the one you meant... Annoying / dangerous UI controls should be kept out of the way of the more common features.

zem 9y ago
one thing that boggles me about the firefox dev team is their continuing refusal to add a "disable ctrl-Q" setting. it's right next to ctrl-W and in my firefox using days i accidentally hit it a ton of times.
- pritambaral 9y ago
  You might like one of the add-ons that disable Ctrl-Q.
  - Supersonic112 9y ago
    There used to be one such Firefox addon that even made it into the Debian (Wheezy/Jessie) repositories. Unfortunately it was written for the old plugin system and never updated and is now designated as blocking the new Firefox multiprocessing, so I already started looking into Firefox addon programming just to replace it. Somehow I never thought about looking for newer alternatives in the official addon store, where several modern ones seem to exist already, so I'd like to thank you a lot for your suggestion.
- sitkack 9y ago
  Chrome used to "honor" the backspace key means navigate backwards so much that if you hit tab (changed focus) while typing a textbox then hit backspace it would nav back and lose all your text. Made me cry so many times.
ytjohn 9y ago
With several versions of windows, I learned to hate how close Help was to Run on the start menu. You're about to run cmd or some specific program, and then next thing you know, your computer is crawling to a halt while it attempts to bring up and display the help ui. Solvable with keyboard shortcuts or creating a shortcut to cmd somewhere else, but still happened enough to be infuriating. In most cases, it was when I was doing work on someone else's computer.
mjlee 9y ago
My favourite example of this is from the Apollo command module. Margaret Hamilton (one of the programmers) had her daughter in the simulator and let her play around. She managed to crash the simulator by launching a certain programme midflight. Margaret wanted to stop this from being possible, but was overruled because astronauts don't make mistakes. Eventually one of the astronauts made that exact mistake during the Apollo 8 flight. Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/

riphay 9y ago

Former banker, and to this day I remove the F1 key from my keyboards because I still use excel heavily. Never really crossed my mind to remove winhelp.exe or anything else. This was a simple solution to a simple problem, didn't need anything more complicated. And if I ever need to access the help function, I'd just stick a pen in the socket and hit the membrane.