document updated 13 years ago, on Apr 21, 2011
The Cook County court terminals are extremely arcane.
- individual keystrokes
- Right Control Key — acts somewhat like the enter key? Though it seems to be preferred over enter by those "in the know", for some reason.
- Pause/Break — sends the "clear" command
- Tab / Shift+Tab — move between fields (though you can use the mouse for this as well)
- Double-click with mouse — launches a document display application, it displays the document-ID that you double-click on
example document IDs: SD300050579
- F7/F8 — PgUp/PgDn when in mutli-page screens (indicated by "PF7", "PF8", etc)
- for more, see View>Keyboard Layout
- strings / commands
- The Windows login is username="user", password="user"
- The login name for the green-screen is "p410"
- To get to the main menu, 1) press the pause/break key, 2) type "user", 3) hit enter
- There are numerous other things you can type besides "user", that let you jump directly to sub-pages, for example "LDDK" and "LDQC". If you care to memorize these, you can look at the upper-left corner of a screen and find the code to insta-jump back there in the future.
- specific screens
- when you search-by-case-ID, for example if the case number were "2010-CH-44408", the string you should enter is "10CH44408" (in other words, no dashes, and only a two-digit year)
- after doing search-by-litigant-name, you can view the detail of a specific case by entering the CURRENT PAGE NUMBER in the first field, and the SEQUENCE NUMBER in the second field
- reconnecting / rebooting
- if you get totally flummoxed, or the terminal seems borked, you can reconnect by using these Windows-menu items:
- 1) Communication>Disconnect, 2) Communication>Connect
- if the Windows menu bar is unavailable, press Ctrl+B
- Note that you can shut down the entire Passport application, and try to restart it. HOWEVER, not all terminals have the shortcut to the application available (the Windows box is heavily locked down), so don't close the application unless you know you can definitely start it back up. (or just use the Disconnect+Connect menu items)
- on the desktop, the icon would be named something like "Clerk System" or ".ZWS" or "Passport"
- If you don't know the Windows login, reboot the computer. It should auto-login whenever it starts up.