Don't computers drive you mad, at times?

I am so happy I have to share this with someone straight away.

I am in the middle of a proofreading project, but I cannot wait to thank my saviour, the person whose wise advice has got me out of a deep hole I fell in exactly 4 days ago when, all of a sudden and for no apparent reason, my laptop decided to play a trick on me.

I had taken it with me to a shopping centre, since I wanted to acquire a laptop stand in a well-known IT-products chain, and decided I might as well take advantage and work for a little while away from the little ones (bless’em), whilst peacefully sipping a nice cup of tea.

As soon as I switched it on, my laptop decided it would be fun to display on the screen, as I was writing, the character located on the upper right hand corner of the keys that contain one instead of the one in a bigger size font on the opposite corner, as it was its duty. In this frame of mind, when I wanted to write luxurious, my laptop would write 34x4r564s instead.

Oh, the shock! I couldn’t understand what was going on, until I realized those little characters on the upper right-hand corner were blue, just like a key on the bottom left-hand side of my keyboard, next to the Ctrl key, called Fn. I pressed it at the same time I pressed one of the offending keys and…bingo! The right character appeared on the screen.

OK, problem solved, for now. All I had to do was press the Fn key whilst using one of the keys with the little blue characters on the right hand corner. All I had to do? Dear me! Have you ever tried it? I was going bonkers within half an hour.

For the following 4 days I struggled and ask everyone around for a solution to the problem, my sister included, who works as an IT programmer. Not even asking around amongst her colleagues at her workplace threw any light on the problem.

Thankfully, I had an ancillary keyboard I had bought a few weeks ago for ergonomic reasons, but that wouldn’t sort out the problem in case I had to take the laptop with me and work away from home, which is what I did this morning.

When I couldn’t stand it any more, one of my clients contacted me regarding an assignment I am working on for them and I asked for help, not holding much hope. She sent me a link to this address and there, at long last, I found the simple answer to my conundrum.

In a nutshell, all I had to do was press the keys Fn +NumLock at the same time. Hey, presto! Problem solved!

In other computers, the combination required might be Fn + Del or Fn + Ins.

This is the link to the article (which is written in Spanish):

http://trueca.blogspot.com.es/2007/07/tecla-fn-atascada-fn-key-stuck.html

And they seem to have lots of other interesting stuff about IT too (although I hope I won’t be needing their assistance very often, fingers crossed).

Trueca, thanks a lot!!