Hotkeys driver...HELP

Hello everyone, as you can tell I'm new to this forum. I have a couple laptops and ran into a problem that I just can't solve on my own with one of them. I've been trying to find the hotkey driver for the Toughbook cf-29 for the past three days with no luck. I went to the panasonic site, downloaded the drivers and they just dont work...2 out of 10 hotkeys work and that's it. They worked last week, but I had some problems and just decided to format the whole drive and so now I have this problem...

Can anyone help...? comments?


Thanks in advance.

 

Have you checked the dealer you bought it from? Are there any driver or backup discs that came with the computer?

 

Just have a regular win xp sp2 cd with it....but no drivers. All the drivers from the Panasonic website work, video, sound, lan, battery recal., etc.....except the hotkey drivers...

 

I'm having the same problem with a CF-48. None of the hot keys will work. I've used the drivers from panasonic but they don't work.

 

I have 2 CF-28s... The 1st one is my main "play" laptop. The other is a spare for parts and experimentation. My working one had the hotkeys working fine. The hotkey driver that I took off the laptop prior to reformatting it was reinstalled. I swapped in a rubberized keyboard and that opened up even more hotkeys. (Lighting for keyboard) I broke the keyboard connector and needed to swap out the motherboard from the spare to my working one. Now NONE of the hotkeys work! (fn keys) I can't imagine it's a BIOS thing since they all offer hotkeys.

I ended up buying a driver CD off of ebay to cover all the drivers for all the variants plus the repair manuals. I even tried the drivers from the CD. Looks like all Toughbook people are having a hard time...

 

I'm surprised to hear this. I own 3 cf45's, 2 cf27's, & am now building a 28. I've never had to load any of Pani's drivers to get the function keys working! Maybe I'll findout different with the 28 but to make em work (in Xp) all I had to do was hold down the Fn key and hit the function I wanted. Even with the 27's backlit boards.

 

Hmmmm... I've tried everything. I've uninstalled the drivers, reinstalled the drivers. The MoBo I swaped in had a diferent number than the one I had in there originally. Don't all CF-28's have hotkey functionality??? I could swear they do. Now I don't know. I have a bottle of Jack Daniels for the person who tells me how!

The only thing I can think of is that I need to reinstall XP on the new MoBo. Maybe there is a conflict of drivers when I swapped. It would be a small price to pay to get my hotkeys back! Either that or I'll unsolder the keyboard connector of the good MoBo and solder it on the original one. It would be tough to do but may be possible.

 

Does anyone know if only certain CF-28's have Fn key functionality? I still can't get mine to work. The only thing I haven't tried is a fresh install of XP. I swapped motherboards because I broke the keyboard connector.. Everything else works fine... Just no Fn key action. My F keys work fine...

Anyone.... Anyone... Bueller?... Bueller?...

 

go to bios to see exactly what model you have. e.g, mine says CFW2 on the front, but the BIOS is more specific, and says CFW2B
Go to this link, which has drivers for every model
https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pc/itn/drivers/d_menu_en.html (google threw it up!)
download and extract the driver to some directory. I have
hkeyman.exe
HKUNINST.VBS
HOTKEY.CAT
HOTKEY.INF
HOTKEY.SYS

I ran the EXE , it installed some option in the start menu, but did not make it work - but do it anyway, it might be part of it. I right clicked the INF and chose install, that did not help.
Then I found the more obvious way to install the driver.. it's similar to how you install a LAN driver in win2k. You choose the item in device manager and properties, point it to the driver location. Here, choose an item under "other devices"(these are HW whose drivers are not installed). I chose the last one.. it detected the driver when I pointed it to it. Restarted windows. Done.
I have Win XP, but since it is an NT, I suspect would work for Vista , or 2k too.

 

Wait a minute.. back up.. Hotkeys? Are you talking about the Fn + Fxx key combinations, doing things like turning up/down the brightness, turning off the sound, showing battery life, etc?

That can't be what this hotkey driver is all about. The Fn key functions function at a much lower level.. They don't need an OS at all! they work in DOS. they work in W9X. they even work in the CMOS setup screens!

So tell me, what IS the hotkey driver for? I install it on mine just because I don't like the yellow ?'s in device manager, but other than that I have no idea what it does!

 

Grav has a good point. There is at least some hotkey functionality on a CF-28 which has no HDD installed. I do have a back lit rubberized keyboard made by Fujitsu which has no hot key markings on the function keys. It is no piece of junk, on a purely visual and tactile basis it seems to be of higher quality than any of the others I have handled. How the h*** did we get this far down the road without this coming up before?
Oops! Forget that last comment, I just noticed that most of this thread is very old.

 

The newer toughbooks (Centrino models) do not have BIOS level support for the hotkeys so you must have the hot key driver loaded to get any hot key function.