windows_survival_guide

windows_survival_guide.txt

# -------------------------
# Windows stuff 
# -------------------------

You may find yourself to wonder, why the mouse cursor disappeared on what seems to be your laptop, while you do see a mouse cursor in the windows login screen, prior to login.

after login:

press Windows and I key, simultaneously, to jump to the 'Windows Settings' dialogue

Windows + I

this jumps right into a search box, type 'Touchpad'

Switch the 'Touchpad' setting to 'On'. The mouse cursor is visible, if the 'Touchpad' setting is 'On'. 
It is not visible while this setting is not enabled.

Now why on earth should the 'Touchpad' setting be ever off???
Why do they allow this kind of customization????

Gemini says, that the reason for allowing a disabled touchpad without a mouse cursor is to allow 'keyboard only navigation'.  
Still, I think it is very user hostile, to have such a setting, that can be switched on by accident, and that results in a 'trapped' state.
Such a setting should only be enabled after displaying three warning dialogue boxes, which explain the ramification of this setting.
a 'Touchpad off' setting should also have a hint in its description, which states that the mouse cursor is not displayed, when the 'Touchpad' is 'Off'.

... But all this is currently not the case ...

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You may find yourself to install windows on your own: can happen if you bought a windows PC that comes without preinstalled windows.
The windows11 installer is requesting a networking driver during installation
it says "lets connect to your local network"
...and you have no idea what to do...

- Search for the wi-fi driver for your PC model on https://www.drvhub.net
- hint: if it's a budget PC then it is most likely a Realtek driver, otherwise it is Intel.
- copy the driver that comes without msi installer to to a usb device and use that.         

- Screenshot of portion of screen

    Windows: 
        Windows + Shift + S 
        A toolbar appears: make sure that the  rectangle icon with tool-help text 'Snipping area' is selected. 
            (Rectangle is the first option in a combobox with that icon)
        select rectangle area with mouse -> copied to clipboard

    OSX: 
        Shift + Command + 4
        select area with mouse -> copied to clipboard (?)
        (also a file is created in directory ~/Desktop)


- Change input language (if multiple input languages enabled)

    Windows:
        Widows + space bar

    OSX 
        Ctrl + space bar


#-------------------

Your laptop keyboard has a broken key? 

Remap the F3 key to the broken key with https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/keyboard-manager

start powertoys
in left pane: Input Output / Keyboard Manager , etc. etc.

(It's not the best tool out there, but I hope security tools won't snap on it, because it's from microsoft.)

Also: you will need function key lock (so that pressing on the F3 key will trigger the function key, and not some other laptop function).
Surprisingly this is an action that may differ between laptops produced by different manufacturers.
What seems to help a lot: pressing Fn + Esc keys - but your laptop may have a different opinion on the matter.

---

That's a stopgap measure, better is to buy a wireless keyboard.
There are two types of wireless keyboards:

- Keyboard that requires a USB dongle.
- Keyboard that auto-connects to wireless network.

Keyboards with a dongle are much better (cost slightly more money). 

#-------------------

Working on windows with WSL? WSL is slow as shit?
This is supposed to fix it:

we have a batch file for that! (involves rebooting the computer, you do that in Windows)

----

REM restart LessManager - a service required for WSL

sc stop LessManager

REM shutdown WSL

wsl --shutdown

REM Now restart windows.

shutdown /s

REM * used to really like WSL, but now it does all sort of funny things...
REM * I think Microsoft had some significant layoffs around 24-25. After that WSL started to suck.
REM * I may be wrong about that...


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A .bat file to run text to speech on windows. 

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@echo off
REM say.bat: A Windows text-to-speech utility
REM %* passes all arguments from the batch file to PowerShell
POWERSHELL -NoProfile -Command "Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech; $synth = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer; $synth.Speak('%*');"
----

.\say.bat "what do you do with a drunken sailor?"

OSX has a more flexible `say` utility, for this purpose...