Re: Laptop with sense of "Fn" key reversed

Rob wrote in message
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"Mortimer" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Rob" <noone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Martin Underwood" <a@b> wrote in message
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My nephew's laptop keyboard has suddenly developed a fault which
causes the sense of the blue Fn key to be reversed: when the key
is *not* pressed, he gets the characters corresponding to the blue
symbols on the keytops; when it *is* pressed he gets the
conventional characters. It's as if a mythical "Fn-key lock" has
been pressed! The problem is user-specific: if he logs in as a
different user,
everything is OK. The problem began when he was using some
speech-recognition software, though I don't know any more details
than this.

When I see him, I can investigate more thoroughly, but I wanted to
check in advance whether anyone has ever seen this symptom and
knows how to fix it.

My F-Lock key isn't mythical!
This may help:
http://askbobrankin.com/turning_flock_key_on_automatically.html

Ah. I've never seen a keyboard that has a Fn lock key - just the
normal Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scr Lock keys.

I'm not sure how relevant the article is, because it talks about
using F-Lock to enable/disable the F1, F2 etc keys, rather than to
toggle the default state of the letter keys which also have blue
symbols corresponding to the characters that are produced
with/without the Fn key being pressed.

You're right - it's not that useful in this case, but the links to the
Registry keys may be. As it's a laptop, it may even be a problem with
num-lock as this can have different effects than on a 'normal'
keyboard. Google "function lock laptop" for info on that kind of
non-standard behaviour - looks more common than I expected!

Thanks for that pointer. It turns out that this *was* the problem: the
NumLock key had got pressed accidentally.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Laptop with sense of "Fn" key reversed
    ... he gets the characters corresponding to the blue ... I've never seen a keyboard that has a Fn lock key - just the ... normal Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scr Lock keys. ... Google "function lock laptop" for info on that kind of ...
    (uk.comp.misc)
  • Re: Laptop with sense of "Fn" key reversed
    ... when it *is* pressed he gets the conventional characters. ... My F-Lock key isn't mythical! ... I've never seen a keyboard that has a Fn lock key - just the normal Caps ... default state of the letter keys which also have blue symbols corresponding ...
    (uk.comp.misc)
  • Re: Laptop with sense of "Fn" key reversed
    ... he gets the characters corresponding to the blue symbols on the ... when it *is* pressed he gets the conventional characters. ... I've never seen a keyboard that has a Fn lock key - just the normal ... Google "function lock laptop" for info on that kind of non-standard ...
    (uk.comp.misc)