Send Button for IMs

this would be very helpful for those of us that play on laptops that are falling to peices.... for instance, my laptop( and I'm not the only one with this problem) is loosing it's keys, my enter key was the first to go also. now I'm pretty sure that most of us out there can't afford to go and replace their laptops every time a key breaks, and I've seen very few laptops that have ports to plug in keyboards with so they can't really go out and buy a keyboard to use. in my oppinion, I think there ought to be a send button in IM windows, so that for those of us that for some reason or another don't have the use of an enter key, can actually IM people. what do you you girls/guys think?

And I can only relate because one day, my old laptop's 1/! key literally FLEW off when I used it. And I wasn't doing more than simple touch-typing. Wasn't as simple as snapping it back into place either.... aye yi yi. Good luck!

You seriously bought a laptop without a USB port?
Does it have a PCMCIA slot?

I'm wondering what company designed this (thinks back to her old Powerbook Duo 230 with no CD Rom, no Scsi port, and no floppy drive.. hose the OS and you were screwed eithout a DuoDock... Man I loved that thing!)

Seriously.. You've GOT to have something to plug a keyboard into.. Bluetooth, or USB, or PCMCIA (you can get a cheapo USB port card for PCMCIA slots at most office supply stores that carry keyboards and the like.

USB keyboards are cheap, and generally work pretty reliably. (though I prefer to keep my precious USB ports free for MP3 player and jump drive, printer, scanner, webcam, joystick, gamepad, etc)

I know there's GOT to be some other optons as well.. INCLUDING buying a replacement keyboard for your laptop, by contacting a local qualified parts dealer for your machine.. Course that won't be a cheap solution.

BUT! if there's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING you can do to add a keyboard (and miraculously the laptop is still good enough to play this walking example of "creeping-featuritis".. there's one more thing you can do.

Start > All Programs > Accessories > Accessability > On-Screen Keyboard

...or poke the little rubber thing that's still there. Or the switch under that (looks like a bunch of curcuits come togther with gold tips but don't actually touch--your finger will complete the ungodly low pwer circuit).

the laptop itself is good, it plays SL better than alot of towers I've seen to be honost, but the keyboard was craptastically designed to be flimsy... worse yet, I've got a warranty but the waranty doesn't cover "wear and tear" and that's what this qualifies under. I myself didn't buy the laptop it was a gift... and it's a dell.. have you EVER dealt with dell techsupport? oye vey... in any case, I do have USB ports, but they are also suffering from wear and tear, and don't want to recognize anything anymore. I would just use an onscrean keyboard, but the problem with that is that I can't actually find one that will work with SL, either fullscreen or windowed.

Damn, time for a new laptop, the last (and only) Dell lappy I had the hinges busted and the screen fell off in about a year and a half.

I don't see why we can't choose our own keys for things in the first place. All major operating systems offer APIs for it, not sure what SL is coded in but Java I'm pretty sure allows it quite happily. Most games offer custom keys, even super amateur flash games do these days =(

yup... that's happening to mine also actually... was it a Latitude series laptop? D810? I gotta know

Any programming language can offer custom keymapping. It's not worth the time to develop for a feature like sending IMs, however, as 98% of people have been raised to understand that "enter" or "return" sends an instant message. Again, it's an interesting idea and if LL had nothing else to do I'd be all for it, but we've got more important things to worry about. D:

Cost of LL dev time to create/test/deploy a new input mapping system: prolly $10k+ worth of programmer time

cost of a replacement laptop keyboard: ~$80

you decide

I have one called "MiloSoft Virtual Keyboard TotalAccess" and if I could get the stupid thing to actually pop up I'd test it with SL right now to make sure, but I'm almost positive I've used it in SL before.
http://www.march-of-faces.org/resources/vkt.html