Type Mobility Center in the Start box to access what used to be called Quickset. That will allow you to change the function keys settings. Your manual or another user will have to help you with the other problem.

thanks! the function key reversal worked perfectly. I can remember seeing the mobility centre screen at some point while i was trying to solve the other problem. now i know what that function does!

ok, any takers for the other problem? i'll admit, i'm less optimistic about that one. maybe there's a way to circumvent the numpad by assigning shortcut keys for certain characters like in Word? or maybe it's one of the keyboard language options? there's so many of those, surely one of them has a numpad in there? i know i can switch to french and spanish keyboards but then each time i'm working on it blindly, not knowing where the special characters actually are. that's very annoying when you have to write 40-page reports for a living!

Thank you for this. My goal was to use the function keys without having to press the fn key.