How to Control the Keyboard on Your PC

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

If you plan to write a lot of fast-paced theatrical drama on your computer, you’ll probably write the word Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa a lot. To do so, you press and hold the A key. After a delay, the A key repeats itself, spewing out the letter A like water from a fire hose. You can control both the delay and how fast the character repeats itself by using the Keyboard Properties dialog box in Windows.

Control the keyboard here.

To open the Keyboard Properties dialog box, follow these steps:

Open the Control Panel window.

In Windows 10, press Win+X to summon the super-secret menu and choose the Control Panel command. In Windows 7, choose Control Panel from the Start menu.
On the View By menu, near the upper-right corner of the window, choose Large Icons.

You need to revert to Icon view in the Control Panel because a direct link to the Keyboard Properties dialog box isn’t available otherwise.
Click the Keyboard icon to display the Keyboard Properties dialog box.
Use the mouse to manipulate the sliders in the dialog box to set the rates.

As you adjust the sliders, type in the box. Press a key, and check the delay and then the repeat rate.
Click the OK button only when you’re happy.
Close the Control Panel window when you’re done.

You might want to change Control Panel view back to Category view before you close its window.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.