Remapping aggravating keys on your keyboard

This weekend I got a long-awaited and badly needed new laptop (a ThinkPad T500), and while I'm overall very happy with the purchase, it isn't without a few nagging flaws.

The biggest of those: the addition of two completely useless keys located near the arrow keys.

In a misguided attempt to make the machine more web-savvy, Lenovo adds "page back" and "page forward" buttons directly over the left and right arrow keys, respectively, shrinking all four keys to make room for the extra buttons.

These sound useful at first -- it's an easy way to flip back and forth while browsing the web, right? -- but in reality they're counterproductive. The problem? Imagine that you're typing a lengthy email (or, ahem, a blog post) into a web form. You reach down to click that left arrow button to go back and fix a typo but instead hit the tiny "page back" key by mistake. Like that, you can lose everything you've just typed into the form, as the browser "forgets" everything you've typed. It's not much consolation that you can use the "page forward" button to get back to the form you accidentally abandoned easily, which will likely be blank when you return.

The solution? Remap those useless keys!

I downloaded KeyTweak to do the job, a quick, simple application that lets you trick your computer into thinking one key is another. In this case, I remapped the back/forward buttons to left/right, so now it doesn't matter which button I push, they both do the same thing. It's a free, small download and it works like a charm, and there are many, many other applications like it out there; a search for "keyboard remapper" will turn up hundreds of options.

Another popular use for key remappers (aside from April Fool's Day pranks): Turning off the Insert key (remap it to Print Screen or something equally harmless so you won't find yourself overwriting your text when you hit it instead of Delete). Many users also like to turn off the Caps Lock key, remapping it either to a regular Shift or to the Ctrl key.

The one thing KeyTweak -- nor any other keyboard remapper -- can't help you with? Doing anything with the Fn key, a fixture on laptops that lets you do things like change the brightness or volume of the computer when pressed in conjunction with another button. The Fn key is different than all the other keys, as it's wired into hardware instead of routing through Windows. It can't be reprogrammed -- which is a shame, because the T500 also commits the sin of putting the Fn key to the left of the Ctrl key instead of the other way around -- but it can be disabled. Unless your computer has a BIOS setting letting you tweak it (and many don't), the only real solution, alas, is a little barbaric: Pry the key off with a screwdriver and throw it away. (You can still use the button by pushing the rubber nubbin left behind, but you'll be less likely to do so on accident.) Ah, progress.