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I've been given a laptop at work, a Dell Inspiron 1545, which I find pretty good, except for the F1-F12 keys.

Being a programmer and a poweruser of several programs, I need to use them a lot, and here they are inverted, you need to press the Fn key to get access to them, and you get the volume up/down, brightness. wireless on/off stuff without pressing the Fn. Is there any way (or hack) to make them the other way around?? F1-F12 just by pressing the key, and the extra functions using Fn?

Its driving me crazy! Specially turning off the wireless when I want to rename stuff!

thanks!

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88% accept rate
Similar question for the Studio 1555: superuser.com/questions/22480/… – Factor Mystic Jun 4 '10 at 23:27
I didn't manage to actually do it, but shutting down the wireless in the middle of a download because I wanted to rename a file was my top fear until just now. Thanks for asking this. – Adriano Varoli Piazza May 22 '11 at 15:25
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2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

In many Dells there's a BIOS setting that will default Fn to on. There probably will be in the 1545.

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thanks, i'll check it out and vote as soon as I have time to reboot my machine, thanks! – bangoker Jun 4 '10 at 23:12
Thanks it worked!! :D – bangoker Jun 6 '10 at 16:23
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up vote 2 down vote

I found 2 solutions. The easiest:

Control Panel - Hardware and Sound - Adjust commonly used mobility settings - Fn Key Behavior

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Thanks! This worked on my Inspiron too, and it's much simpler than mucking with the bios. – Adriano Varoli Piazza May 22 '11 at 15:24
For some reason I'm not seeing the "Fn Key Behavior" settings on my Lenovo Edge (Windows 7 64 bit). – ripper234 Sep 1 '11 at 8:46
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