[thechat] Function of "Fn" Key

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Sun Jun 2 05:47:01 CDT 2002


---- Original Message ----
From: "Syed Zeeshan Haider" <szh at hotpop.com>
To: "Evolt TheChat" <thechat at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2002 9:14 PM
Subject: [thechat] Function of "Fn" Key

> Hello Everybody,
>
> I asked following question some days ago but got no response,
> therefore, I am posting it again.

Syed, I think that if you didn't get a response, it was because no-one was
sure.

> I have Microsoft Natural Keyboard with my PC. Today I got a very
> strange problem. I pressed Fn+F1, Fn+F2, Fn+F3 successively to see
> what happens... and the keyboard stopped to respond on any key hit.

I think the moral of this story is don't press keys at random on your
keyboard ;)

> [snip]
>
> My questions are:
> 1.    What is the function of "Fn" key? (On my keyboard, it is on the
> right side of right-hand side "Shift" key.)

It enables other functions of other keys on the keyboard - for example if I
press Fn+F3 on my Vaio, it mutes the speakers, because that's the way Sony
have programmed it.  This will obviously differ on other laptops/keyboards.

> 2.    Can you guess the problem with the keyboard, which I
> encountered?

Yes, the driver software was written by Microsoft :)  Have you looked any of
this up on http://support.microsoft.com/ ??

> 3.    How did the keyboard came back to work?

Because whatever you did was a temporary thing, and rebooting your machine
reset whatever you'd changed back to the default.

--
_ __/|   ___  ___ __ _________  "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
\`O_o'  / _ \/ -_) // / __/ _ \  for Sega." -- Brodie, 'Mallrats'
=(_ _)=/_//_/\__/\_,_/_/  \___/ @ well.com :: William Anderson
   U - Ack! Phttpt! Thhbbt!     http://neuro.wasters.com/




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