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'Home' and 'End' and 'FN'.

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evamaria:
Keypads with Notebooks, for numbers? Might be possible in some cases. In most cases, and with most notebooks, this is not possible, though, since the numkey setting necessary for the keypad also switches the numkeysetting of the notebook keyboard, and only some keypads promise to do this properly, meaning differently for the keypad and not affecting the notebook, and even with some of these (Hama, with special advertising on this matter), I had extreme problems, a minute it worked properly, the next it switched those keyboard keys to numbers, after some typing on the keypad - it was a nightmare - so I discarded keypads for notebooks a long time ago. (There is always the venerable Cherry 4700, but that costs four times the price and runs with special software, but then is excellent and doesn't cause any problems, except by its size.)

But here the task is the other way round: The keypad would not be switched to numlock, but have all these navigational keys handy that on the notebook are too tiny, and just replicating them. And this means Edvard's advice is brilliant, as long as you don't try to enter numbers with that keypad: Spend 8 or 10 bucks, and have all these navigation keys in due size and in proper arrangement! (But bear in mind no macro program will be able to distinguish between them and those on the keyboard, meaning you will just "lose" the latter, not have them available for other commands - in case you think of combining these solutions.)

IainB:
These may be of use:
CAPshift v1.7
ShiftOff v1.2
Microsoft remapkey.exe

I have used remapkey for years.

pilgrim:
Thanks for the replies, I have had a quick look at some of the software mentioned and found some interesting reading which I will go back to.

As I said in my original post I do not really want to remap any keys as those that I use the least tend to be connected to the FN key so I would lose 2 functions not 1.
I just had a look and there are 35 keys that are connected to the FN key, that's not far off half the keyboard (84 keys).

Leaving aside keyboards with FN keys when I press either the Home or End keys on a full size keyboard they obviously send a command to the OS, presumably to a DLL or an EXE file, my original idea was to find those commands and trigger them from a shortcut, either directly or through a batch file, the problem is finding those commands.

Edvard,

I had never seen one of those before, I looked them up and found a selection on Amazon, all reasonably priced, I would prefer not to add any hardware but it is worth keeping in mind.
Mouse movements are not really an option as switching between keyboard and mouse is something I try to avoid doing more than necessary.

tomos:
I'm not clear pilgrim - are you also against the AHK idea (if that could work) ?
replacing home (Fn+Home) with an easier combination, e.g. Ctrl [SOME-KEY]+Home

[edit] It's complicated by the fact that Home itself is used in keyboard-combination - with Control AND Shift at any rate [/edit]

tomos:
[..]
Microsoft remapkey.exe

I have used remapkey for years.
-IainB (May 15, 2013, 10:05 PM)
--- End quote ---

that looks nice - have you tried it on more recent OS's?
I see on the MS dowload page they say Note: The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools are not supported on 64-bit platforms.-
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17657

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