What Does the Pause/Break Key Do?

We explain the history and function of another obscure key today...





Intro Theme: Showdown by F.O.O.L from Monstercat - Best of 2016

[dash]

That windows key + break to bring up your system info is by far the most helpful thing in this video

[tohlmann]

skip directly to the tunnelbear ad ---> 03:09

[SirBilliam]

I really want to know what the origin of the function keys are and why there are 12 of them.

[co.larich]

It will either pause any video you have playing on screen, or break your computer, 50/50 chance. If you have no video playing, then it will 100% break the computer

[chikkachu]

Obviously, that key is dedicated for pause in Age of Empires II.

[ContinualImprovement]

So does this mean I *shouldn’t* delete system32?

[Furgelnod]

The pause/break key has some quirks which should've been included in the video, holding it down produces a single keystroke without any repetition. Usually keys held down send a down repeatedly then up once you release the key. Pause/break on the other hand sends a single down then immediately up and nothing when its released, which makes it less than useful in a variety of circumstances.

[not_proton]

Instructions unclear:
Pressed break, and now I'm broke

[Shinigami]

who tried pressing Pause while watching this just to see if the video will pause?

[nKOBEb]

TQ is the perfect platform for Jon - he is bad at the standard LTT vids but this nerdy informant kind of environment is just great with him

[Towelie]

In Soviet Russia. Viruses gets Windows.

[RascalCase]

Just when you said “pause” my YouTube froze and I was like what

[GrothBrooks]

Great to see more people on these videos is always great. Nothing against Linus (He's great too), but it's weird that he is the host for nearly every video when the company has so many people.

[hkoizumi]

I did Windows+Pause at work PC. I found out it has 16GB of RAM in a 32bit Win7

[ravewulf]

No mention of using Pause/Break for debugging software in IDEs?

[MudkipOnYT]

2:35 Windows 10 Pro on...
AN INTEL ATOM N550?! AT 1.5GHz?! AND ONE GIG OF RAM?! My god...

[axelolord]

Multiple apps still use the break key for different functions obviously.
One of the more common ones in office use is for excel macros. A break key will stop any ongoing vba code in its tracks - very useful for stopping loops and identifying them since it will automatically show the spot it was at in the code processing at the time.

(as a sidenote if you're on a laptop and don't have a break key to do that - double tapping the esc key in Excel will have the same function)

[Cyrdian]

It's useful as a developer to stop the compiler and go back to editing code. This goes for multiple applications that have long(-ish) running processes. Doesn't have to be on the command prompt. To me this is the main use case, they didn't properly cover it (it kind of falls in the realm of the command line process interruptions, but you're not using the command prompt...).

[marius]

Instructions are not clear (the system32 file was replaced by a picture with a d***)

[lionelouellette]

These are some of my favorite types of Techquickie videos. Thanks guys.