January 06, 2005
F-Lock Key on new Microsoft Keyboards
I have one of the new MS keyboards at work and have been getting pretty frustrated with the new F-Lock key which defaults to make your function keys act as Windows shortcuts instead of as regular function keys by default. Everytime you boot up you have to remember to press the F-Lock key to make your the F5 key mean refresh instead of "Open." I'm sure lots of thought went into deciding on that as the default, and it may have been the right decision. I just wanted to know how to reverse the decision for my keyboards. So I started looking around to see if I could figure out how to code a quick app that would help me change the defaults or automatically set it on at startup. However, it seems you can't programmatically change it. But I found a registry hack to reverse the f-keys' default behavior and it works great. For those of you who are interested, you can get more info here.
Update: For some reason, comments aren't showing up for this entry even though I've received a few. Jason, who created the f-lock hack I described above, came by and left a comment updating us on the fact that he now has support for the new USB Microsoft keyboards. You can get more info here.
[Originally posted on jixal.com/blog on 9/19/2003]
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Posted by gus at January 6, 2005 09:22 PM
