If you’ve been using computers long enough, you have made every one of these mistakes at least 5 times or more.
1. Accidentally hitting the Insert key
You’re typing up a document and go to make an edit in the middle of a sentence, and the letters start getting “eaten” away. You freak out because you think something is dreadfully wrong. Nope. You hit the Insert key by mistake and switched from “Overwrite” to “Insert” mode.
Tip: You can tell which editing mode you have enabled by looking at the bottom portion of most document editors. In Word for example, standard editing is usually shown as “OVR”; insert is “INS”. When you toggle between the two you’ll see OVR change to INS and back. You always want OVR unless you specifically need INS, which most people don’t. Correction: You want INS and not OVR by default.
2. Mashing Caps Lock instead of SHIFT
Attack of the fat fingers here, even if you have skinny fingers. You go to capitalize a letter and oH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THIS.. oops. Caps lock.
3. Accidentally hitting the ‘flag’ key
Gamers encounter this one the most because the left-side CTRL is used in many games. You go to do a function in the game that requires left CTRL and pause…. huh? What’s happening. WHY DID MY GAME CLOSE? Oh.. ‘Windows’ key. Sh*t.
4. Accidentally disconnecting your wi-fi on a laptop from F2
The function keys, commonly referred to as “F” keys on the top of every laptop keyboard are dual-function; they have blue and white text. Blue does one thing, white does another. Starting in the late 2000s a whole bunch of laptops started shipping where the standard function was “flipped,” meaning what was a secondary function was now primary. This can be changed back to the way it used to be usually via the BIOS, by the way. Even my little Dell mini 10v netbook was guilty of having the F keys flipped.
The wireless on/off toggle, as in the key with the little image of a tower on it, is usually F2. Sooner or later you’ll run into a program that needs to use F2. Being your F keys are flipped, you completely forget that you’re supposed to use Fn+F2 and not just F2 alone, hit the key, and… off goes your wireless.
The sad part is that most people don’t realize what they did, don’t press F2 again to re-enable and just reboot the computer instead to get the wi-fi connection back.
The really sad part is that most of you who just read this had no idea what the Fn key actually did on a laptop until reading this right now.
5. Attack of the StickyKeys
This is a Windows-only thing. You’re bored so you start tapping your right-side SHIFT key. Then your computer makes this nasty “BLEEP!” (or sometimes blip) noise that scares the hell out of you, and you see this pop up:
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