I recently had Vista die on my laptop, so I backed up the hard drive, formatted and installed Windows 7. So far, most things are working really well, with one very significant exception: The F8 signal doesn't seem to register.
Here's the strange part: Pressing SHIFT-F8, or Fn-F8, or other combinations work just fine, but F8 alone does nothing. I wrote a quick Delphi program to verify this. It receives WM_KEYDOWN messages from Windows for other keys, but nothing for F8 unless I'm also pressing a modifier key.
It's not a keyboard issue, since I get the same results with the built-in keyboard and an external USB keyboard. It's not a program-related issue, since I have the same problem in multiple different programs. And it's not a Windows 7 issue, since F8 works as expected on my Win7 workstation at work.
Has anyone seen this before? Any idea how to fix it?
EDIT: I mentioned this to a coworker and he suggested I might have F8 bound as a global hotkey, even though pressing it doesn't seem to do anything. But he didn't know how to find what it was bound to or how to fix it. Does anyone know how I could verify this, and fix it if that's what's going on?
Fn
key+a F key, eg to enable VGA port), they decided to make the default press of a function key behave likeFn
was pressed (in the old laptops). To activate the traditional function keys, eg Alt-F4, you now have to add an extraFn
. This is ludicrous. I use Alt-F4, Ctrl-F4, F8, etc thousands more times than having to switch monitors in a day. Some manufacturers have a BIOS option to restore to old, some not.