0

A few of my laptop keys no longer function after our 4 year old raged out on the keyboard in a fit of gaming frustration.

One of these keys is the brightness increase fn key (f12). This means that when the brightness is turned down, there is no way to turn it back up without going through the settings GUI. I have found myself a few times with a black screen, forcing me to swap monitors to get it bright enough to see and turn it back up manually. (I am not sure why, but the Win 10 brightness decrease drops it to 0% from time to time after 1 key press, and in battery mode it stays dark.)

  • Is there any way to disable these or all brightness keyboard shortcuts? I have no use for brightness adjustment on this laptop. On AC its 100%, and on battery it auto-dims.
  • If that's not possible, is there a way to add new shortcut(s) such as win + something? I don't even need level adjustment ... just some key combo to get it back to 100% brightness.

I have searched around a bit for this answer, but didn't see anything addressing this at the [custom] shortcut key level.

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Check your laptop's BIOS settings. Certain manufacturers include an option to disable the FN key functions: you may even find default brightness settings in there.

Another option is to check if there's an icon anywhere on your keyboard that looks like a padlock with the letters "fn" in it: or something similar even. If your keyboard has this button, then you can usually press it in combination with the 'Fn' key to act as an 'Fn' lock similar to Caps Lock.

Improve this answer
1
  • Good idea on the bios, thanks! I will give that a try. And, it looks like on my Lenovo 505GS, there is no fn lock key. However, Lenovo claims that fn + esc works as a lock for the session....but sadly doesn't work on this laptop. Ill check out bios updates as well -- perhaps this fn + esc lock was added later (this laptop is from 2013).
    – dhaupin
    Commented Jun 1, 2019 at 20:50

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .