[OT] ASUS Notebook Key questions

[hugh....@hotmail.com]

Since the ASUS notebook forums seem to have been closed down - at
least that's the strong impression I'm getting as a result of Googling
- I hope I can be forgiven for asking what seems like a few dumb
questions on this forum.

I have an ASUS K55N notebook which was new at Christmas (2012). It has
a few unusual keys on it whose purpose I don't recognize. Now, it IS a
Canadian keyboard (special keys for French accents and punctuation) so
that may explain part of the problem but I doubt it explains all of
it.

The keys which are baffling me are:
a) An extra Z key, in the top left of the keyboard immediately to the
right of ESC (which is in the top left corner). It has a large Z, a
small z, and f1 written on the key. The f1 makes sense but is it
really another Z/z? If so, why? (When I type that key, nothing is
displayed, regardless of if SHIFT is down or not.)
b) An Alt Car key, which is immediately to the right of the space bar.
Is this just an ALT key with extra text on it? If not, what is it
supposed to do? I thought it might be French for Alternate Character
and give me the blue French characters which are marked on certain
keys but when I hold down ALT CAR and try the keys with French
characters on them, nothing happens: no key gets written.
c) The one that really has me going is the key immediately to the
right of the Alt Car key. It has no text at all on it. The graphic is
a square with three horizontal lines on it. The horizontal lines are
equally spaced within the box and don't go as far as the right and
left boundaries of the box. When I try pressing that, it gives me
menus. Here in Firefox in this text box, I get Undo, Copy, Paste, etc.
Outside the text box but still in the browser, I get a menu with Back,
Forward, Reload etc. On my desktop, what I get depends on what is in
focus. I've never seen a key that behaves like this on any computer.
Is this what it is supposed to be doing?

I can't find anything in the manuals about what these keys do but the
manuals are very skimpy in any case so I'm not that surprised.

--
Rhino

[tumppiw]

a) I don't know, but it might give something when pressed together with
the blue Fn (function) key (usually somewhere in the lower left corner
and marked blue, like marked on some other keys) On my Acer Aspire One,
the blue Fn+F5 swithes between display modes when another screen is
connected (extended, cloned...)

b) should be AltGr -key , used to get special lettering (like ã which is
a+tilde(the wavy one) , usually these are marked on the keycaps lower
right corner) (I'm writing on a SWE/FI keyboard, so I'm not sure where
all keys are on other languages)
To get @ , I have to press AltGr+2, $ is AltGr+4, [ is AltGr+8 etc.

The blue characters on your keyboard functions with the Fn -key

c) that's the menu key, as you found out. This menu depends on where you
are in the programs(I haven't found a good use for that key, as it's
functions change, on desktop it's the same as Rclick mouse)




--
-----------------------------------------------------
Thomas Wendell
Helsinki, Finland
Translation to/from FI/SWE not always accurate
-----------------------------------------------------

[Anssi Saari]

hugh....@hotmail.com writes:

> The keys which are baffling me are:
> a) An extra Z key, in the top left of the keyboard immediately to the
> right of ESC (which is in the top left corner). It has a large Z, a
> small z, and f1 written on the key. The f1 makes sense but is it
> really another Z/z? If so, why? (When I type that key, nothing is
> displayed, regardless of if SHIFT is down or not.)

> b) An Alt Car key, which is immediately to the right of the space bar.
> Is this just an ALT key with extra text on it? If not, what is it
> supposed to do? I thought it might be French for Alternate Character
> and give me the blue French characters which are marked on certain
> keys but when I hold down ALT CAR and try the keys with French
> characters on them, nothing happens: no key gets written.

Perhaps one thing to understand is that as a rule computers don't know
what's printed on the keyboard keys, they just interpret numeric codes
from the keyboard according to some setting.

So for these extra keys to do something you'd need to setup your
keyboard in the operating system to be the Canadian French
variant. Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY covers the
differences in various French layouts but only mentions Canadian French
briefly.

Microsoft also has a nice page which shows various keyboard layouts at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964651.aspx although those
aren't specific to your laptop.

[hugh....@hotmail.com]

On 25 Apr, 03:23, tumppiw <tumppiwNOS...@gmail.com> wrote:

My Fn key is white, not blue. They seem to be using blue exclusively
for French characters on this laptop. When I did Fn+Z/z/f1, the
display went out and the power button went dark. Pressing the space
bar didn't bring it back but pressing the power button gave me a
Windows signin screen (I'm running Win8); once I signed in I was back
here. I think it put me in Hibernate or Sleep modes; I'm still not
clear on the difference.

> b) should be AltGr -key , used to get special lettering (like ã which is
> a+tilde(the wavy one) , usually these are marked on the keycaps lower
> right corner) (I'm writing on a SWE/FI keyboard, so I'm not sure where
> all keys are on other languages)
> To get @  , I have to press AltGr+2, $ is AltGr+4, [ is AltGr+8 etc.
>

Mine definitely says ALT CAR. Now that I think about it, CAR is
probably an abbreviation for the French caractre (I can't remember
where the accents go on the French word). The other reply says that
something probably has to be turned on via software to get the
accented letters over and above just pressing the ALT CAR key. I
remember turning off something like that the first day I had the
laptop. I kept getting French characters/punctuation when I didn't
want it and poked around until I found the language settings. I
deleted the language originally installed - Canadian Multilingual
maybe, I don't recall now. I chose English (Canada) with a US keyboard
layout.

> The blue characters on your keyboard functions with the Fn -key

I think I'd have to change the language back to whatever it was to get
the blue characters to work again. But that's okay, things are just
fine the way they are. I just wanted to know what ALT CAR was supposed
to do and I'm satisfied now that they will produce the blue characters
if I want to restore the original language.

>
> c) that's the menu key, as you found out. This menu depends on where you
> are in the programs(I haven't found a good use for that key, as it's
> functions change, on desktop it's the same as Rclick mouse)
>

I'd never seen such a key on a keyboard before. I'm still not sure why
it's there given that it is just duplicating a function already
provided by the mouse or touchpad. I was reluctant to touch it since I
wasn't sure what it was going to do. That was a flashback to my first
days of using a mainframe terminal 30 years ago and I realized it was
silly to think that way so I just did the logical thing and tried it.
I just wasn't sure if it was doing what it was supposed to do since
that didn't seem very necessary.

I'm disappointed in how little information about the keyboard is
provided with the computer. I had assumed the proper use of the all
the keys and characters would be provided in the documentation that
came with the computer but the docs only cover the function keys and
leave the rest up to your imagination.

Of course the multitude of keyboards available does complicate the
manufacturers' lives so I can sympathize with them to an extent.
Anyway, thanks for your help with this, Thomas.

--
Rhino

[hugh....@hotmail.com]

On 25 Apr, 04:34, Anssi Saari <a...@sci.fi> wrote:

> hugh.mun...@hotmail.com writes:
> > The keys which are baffling me are:
> > a) An extra Z key, in the top left of the keyboard immediately to the
> > right of ESC (which is in the top left corner). It has a large Z, a
> > small z, and f1 written on the key. The f1 makes sense but is it
> > really another Z/z? If so, why? (When I type that key, nothing is
> > displayed, regardless of if SHIFT is down or not.)
> > b) An Alt Car key, which is immediately to the right of the space bar.
> > Is this just an ALT key with extra text on it? If not, what is it
> > supposed to do? I thought it might be French for Alternate Character
> > and give me the blue French characters which are marked on certain
> > keys but when I hold down ALT CAR and try the keys with French
> > characters on them, nothing happens: no key gets written.
>
> Perhaps one thing to understand is that as a rule computers don't know
> what's printed on the keyboard keys, they just interpret numeric codes
> from the keyboard according to some setting.
>

Yes, I realize that ;-)

And I'm very glad of that too. It means you can remap keys, which I
found very useful since this keyboard adds an extra key between the
Left Shift and the Z which was driving me crazy; every time I grabbed
for where the Left Shift was supposed to be, I got a backslash so
instead of getting A, I'd get \a. I poked around and found KeyTweak
and used it to turn that extra backslash into a second Left Shift.

> So for these extra keys to do something you'd need to setup your
> keyboard in the operating system to be the Canadian French

> variant. Wikipedia athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTYcovers the

> differences in various French layouts but only mentions Canadian French
> briefly.
>

It's all coming back to me now. I was getting a lot of French
characters in my typing the first day I had the laptop so I'd poked
around and dropped the original language, whatever it was (Canadian
Multilingual maybe), and replaced it with English (Canada) and chose a
US keyboard layout. Then, I used KeyTweak to remap that backslash key
and I was good to go.

> Microsoft also has a nice page which shows various keyboard layouts athttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964651.aspxalthough those

> aren't specific to your laptop.

Thanks for the link. I had a look at that but what I have isn't the
same as ANY of the three Canadian keyboards they list. That may be
because that page apparently doesn't talk about Windows 8, just XP
(SP2) through Win2008. I must have a newer layout that isn't covered
on that page, perhaps something new to Win8.

Thanks for your reply to my question. I think I understand this
keyboard better now, although I'm still not sure what the extra Z/z is
for on the f1 key.

--
Rhino

[Peter Johnson]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:28:29 -0700 (PDT), hugh....@hotmail.com
wrote:

> I'm still not sure what the extra Z/z is
>for on the f1 key.

Well, it put you into sleep/hibernate mode so that may be its purpose.
Here in the UK Zzzz are often used to indicate sleep.

[tumppiw]

French manual (not CN/FR) is available at
https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/K55N/#support_Download_36

almost at the bottom (User manual for french edition)

On page 40-41 it tells what the Fn+F? does...