- Let's talk about keyboard functionality
and touchpad functionality on a laptop.
Now, the keyboard on a laptop is generally the same
as a desktop keyboard.
The main difference is gonna be your function key,
and the additional functionality
on these function keys up here.
Some laptops are known as desktop replacements,
and these have a full-size, 101-keyboard
with an entire numeric keypad over here.
This one is not a desktop replacement.
It's a standard laptop that takes those numeric keys
and places them here,
and also the additional keys here like Page Up, Page Down,
that six-key portion of the keyboard.
So, it's all condensed into one section.
But what I'm interested in here for the laptop
is the differences between this and the desktop,
and that's mainly the function key.
And so, what this allows us to do is it allows us
to have secondary functions on these function keys up here.
And sometimes on a mobile device
you'll see that listed as second,
and you might even have that in addition
to the function key.
And that's more for industrial devices
and more specialized devices,
but for the laptop we have the Fn key,
that's the function key,
that allows these to have secondary purposes.
For example, F2, the F2 key,
that might get you into the BIOS,
or it might open a particular application,
or you could bind it with a macro.
It could do a lot of things in the operating system,
but if we press the function key and F2
what it does is it reduces the brightness of the screen.
And you'll notice I just pressed the function key
and the backlight came on for this keypad.
That's a nice feature of a keypad on a laptop,
on some laptops, but not necessarily different
than keyboards from a desktop computer.
And you get lots of bells and whistles like that on laptops.
But again, that main thing I'm looking for here
is the function, the additional functionality.
So, for example, the additional functionality on this laptop
we have the F1 key equals question mark, which means help.
And that's standard.
F1 is generally help for most systems,
but the F2 and F3 keys are used
to reduce and increase brightness.
The F4 key is used to toggle between the main monitor
and an external monitor, or both.
And that's very common on laptops,
that it's F4 that'll be the toggle key
for multiple monitors.
And then you have a lot of other options here,
playback and volume, and also muting and wireless.
Let's show an example of a couple of those
in action right now.
I'm in Windows 8 on this,
I'm just gonna go to the desktop area.
I have my website open here.
And by the way, you'll notice there's a lot of other videos
on my website in the A+ section
so feel free to check those out,
but let's show a couple of these keys here.
And the first one will show the brightness.
If we press the function key at the same time,
hold down the function key,
and then press the reduce brightness button,
which normally is F2,
you'll see that the brightness goes way down.
And you can see that display.
You can see how it's modified there, okay?
Sometimes the lamp on an LCD starts to go bad,
and if someone was to reduce the brightness all the way
they might not see the screen at all.
So, always check that, check and make sure
that the brightness is up.
As laptops get older, as the displays get older,
the lamp might fail,
and so you always wanna check that.
Increase that guy and make sure that you can see
what's going on there before you troubleshoot any further.
Another one, the volume, we have our volume keys here.
And if we hold down the function key
and press the down volume you can see that decreases
on the screen, increase the volume, okay?
So, sometimes a person might say,
"Hey, I can't hear anything from the speakers."
Well, one of the first things you wanna check is the volume.
Make sure that the volume is high enough
where it can be heard from the speakers,
especially in a noisy environment.
And also check that mute button,
on this laptop the F11 key is the mute.
So, that's a quick way of getting
the volume down to nothing,
and that is something you wanna check as well.
You'll see that real quickly 'cause in the notification area
you'll see on the sound icon there's a red line,
a circle with a red line through it,
meaning that the volume is muted.
So, if we hit that again that disappears
and we get our volume back.
When troubleshooting the sound on a laptop
check the obvious, check the actual volume.
You can check that in the operating system,
but you can also check it physically on the laptop.
And that's usually associated with one
of the function keys on the laptop.
And you might have a slider also on an older laptop,
so check the actual volume
and make sure that it's not turned all the way down or muted
before you do any further troubleshooting.
And another one, very important, is the wireless.
People hit this, I see this all the time.
People come in, "I can't connect to anything,
I don't know what's going on."
And if you hit the wireless button
you'll see that you get an X, a red circle with a white X,
on that wireless icon in the notification area.
So, that generally, the first thing you wanna do
on a laptop, press that function key
and press that wireless button.
And then give it a minute to recheck and enable
and connect to the wireless.
So, always check that, that's very important.
And so, that's the basic keyboard functionality.
You can go into laptops a ton with keyboards,
but other than that the keyboard functionality
is a lot the same as a desktop computer.
You might have little bells and whistles here and there
that make it different from one device to the next,
from one manufacturer to the next,
but that's the general idea.
You want to know what these function keys are
and what they do.
And another one here, function key and F1,
that brings up help.
And we're in the browser Google Chrome,
so it actually brought up the Chrome Help page.
So, that's pretty cool.
So, F1 or function and F1 can get you
to a lot of help options within browsers,
within your application you're working in,
or just in Windows.
So, here we have the touchpad,
and that's the other part of a laptop
that makes it different from a desktop.
And this takes the place of a mouse.
You have instead of moving the mouse
you move your finger over the touchpad itself,
move your finger by dragging,
and you can see the cursor moves.
And you have your two buttons,
your primary click and your alternate click.
And you can switch these if you want
depending if you're righty or lefty,
but generally people will call this the click
and the right-click.
And so, these work in the same way.
We can hover on something and click
to bring up that page, or we can right-click
to bring up the right-click, or alternate click, menu,
as you see here.
But what's more important is the functionality
of the touchpad itself.
You can touch and drag to move the cursor around,
and on this particular guy you can tap as well too.
You don't have to necessarily click on something.
Just before we clicked on a link
by using the main-click button,
but on this touchpad you can just tap
and that'll click the link for you.
So, it's tapping just like on a mobile device,
like a smartphone or a tablet, and works the same way.
And that's a little easier
and uses less energy than actually clicking this device,
so economy of motion there.
Now, the other thing though is you can use the touchpad
on a lot of laptops now with multiple fingers.
So, for example, with one finger
we're moving the mouse cursor around.
We can just call it a cursor
'cause there's really no mouse involved here.
With two fingers we can scroll,
and scroll the webpage, or whatever document you're in.
And there's other options.
You can use three fingers or four fingers
to do various swiping and moving of applications,
and that'll depend on the operating system you're using
and the laptop you're using, the touchpad that you're using.
Another example, we can swipe all the way
from the right outside of the touchpad and swipe over,
and that'll bring up the Charms Bar.
And so, now we can use the Charms Bar
to do what we want here as well.
If we hit the Windows key to go to the Start screen
we can go all the way up into the corner,
and if we drag up into the upper-left corner
we'll see the desktop.
And we can just tap that to bring that up.
So, there's a lot of functionality here where we can
make use of Windows just with the touchpad,
and you can get external touchpads as well
that connect via USB.
And so, there's a lot of possibilities with this,
and especially on the Mac too.
There's a lot of two, three, and four-finger possibilities
when it comes to working with the touchpad.
So, there's a little bit about the keyboard functionality
and touchpad functionality.
Remember to always check those function keys.
If something's not working check those function keys first.
Check the brightness, check the mute, check the volume,
check that wireless, very important.
And watch the icons in the notification area
to see if there's a,
if the problem was resolved quickly
just by using that function key combination.
One other thing you might notice that, oh,
we talked about the numeric keypad.
Some laptops will have a full numeric keypad.
Other laptops, and you don't see this as often now,
but other laptops will put the numbers over here
on top of these letters.
And you can use the function key with the numbers.
So, the I might be the number two or something,
and so you press the function key and I to get number two.
So, you have that possibility.
And plus you could turn that on and off
with the Number Lock key
so that you don't have to use the function key,
so that's a possibility as well.
And sometimes you'll get people
with those types of older laptops that'll say,
"Hey, I'm typing but I'm not getting all letters.
I'm getting letters and numbers."
And that's because that secondary function,
those numbers that are here,
has been turned on with the Number Lock key.
So, know the Number Lock key and also that function key.
And if you ever have some problems with the trackpad,
sometimes people have issues with the trackpad.
It could just require a cleaning.
So, you use your 50-50 mix of isopropyl alcohol and water.
Make sure you apply that to a dry, lint-free cloth first,
and then rub that on here just to clean it off.
Also, sometimes the driver might need to be updated
depending on the OS that you're using
or the application that you're using
to make it work properly.
So, there's a couple things about the touchpad
and the keyboard, what to look out for on a laptop.
And that's it for this sub-lesson.