Using both laptop keyboard and wireless external keyboard

Question

I have a new Inspiron 600 laptop and I've connected a wireless mouse and keyboard to it.  I would like to be able to use the external keyboard at my desk and the laptop keyboard when I use the computer in other places.  It seems that the settings for the external keyboard have taken over and affected the settings of the laptop keyboard.  Whether connected or not, I have odd things happening with the laptop keyboard such as, Fn-Hibernate doesn't work, Fn-screen brightness starts up Messenger, scroll on touch pad no longer works, etc.

Suncarol · Answer

whoops - should have said Inspiron 6000!

GilesKennedy · Answer

I had all sorts of problems with this setup when I bought (all from Dell) my Inspiron 5100 and the Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse. After hours of faffing around I uninstalled the Logitech drivers and did a system restore as the Logitech drivers actually overwrote the built-in drivers and even the driver rollback didn't work. As an alternative to the restore you could re-install the original keyboard and mouse drivers. Basically I had to choose between having the built-in kbd/mouse working normally and having the extra functionality of the wireless keyboard. I had hoped Logitech might sort this out with later hardware/driver versions but hey I'm not actually surprised if they haven't!!. The only partial solution that came up was to use hardware profiles but I often hot-plug the wireless dongle so that was little use. It seems the drivers didn't really work with laptop setups. Using hardware profiles might work for you if you don't need to hot-plug the wireless dongle.   My original post was here http://delltalk.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_input&message.id=20718

Suncarol · Answer

Thanks for your response.  I did end up uninstalling the drivers for both the keyboard and mouse and then just plugged them back in so that the laptop drivers ruled the day.  Some functionality is missing on the wireless keyboard, but I'm fine with that - since I'd rather have the functionality of the laptop keyboard when I move it from my desk.

GilesKennedy · Answer

@Suncarol wrote:
Thanks for your response. I did end up uninstalling the drivers ...

Really it's pretty poor that Logitech (or whoever) and Dell haven't resolved this problem. They have had long enough and it would appear that they don't intend to.

I imagine that if one knows how to do it it might be possible to get the additional keyboard keys to work by manually hacking the registry, but I've no idea which registry keys would need to be inserted/amended.

Message Edited by GilesKennedy on 07-19-2005 09:50 PM

Locked Topics – Laptops General

Using both laptop keyboard and wireless external keyboard

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