Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day

For many laptops, pressing Fn+Up Arrow will increase the brightness of the screen (decreasing battery life), while pressing Fn+Down Arrow will decrease the brightness of the screen (increasing battery life, but also increasing how much you need to squint to read the screen).

Take a look around on your keyboard and see if you can find this icon (probably in blue):

For many Dell laptops, it’s the End key in the upper right.

Press Fn plus that key, and your speaker will be muted.

Don’t try it now! But for many laptops (not all), Fn+Esc allows you to Suspend your computer, switching it to a mode where the hard drive and screen are disabled in order to save battery power.

(Usually closing the screen accomplishes the same task, but sometimes you want to leave the screen open.)

Not every laptop uses this keystroke, but most seem to.

If you’re on a plane or in a hospital, you should disable your wireless receiver. Or suppose you’re riding in a train or car and you know there’s no wireless signal, you’ll increase your battery performance if you disable the wireless receiver.

Hit Fn+F2 and it’ll toggle wireless on and off. (Practice it a few times so you can recognize how the icons in the system tray appear, so you’ll know to switch it back on if you ever disable it by accident.)

This week we’ll talk about some common laptop shortcut keys.

Most laptops have an “Fn” (or “Function”) button, usually in the lower left, and quite often color-coded in blue. This Fn button usually is used to get alternate keystrokes, necessary because a laptop keyboard usually has fewer keys than a desktop keyboard, so more keys have to do extra duty. For example, the “J” key usually doubles as a 1 on the number pad, so Fn+J produces a 1.

On many laptops (but by no means all), the function keys across the top center double as special laptop controls when used with the Fn button.

You’re no doubt familiar with the Fn+F8 key to toggle on the external monitor. This isn’t universal, but it’s pretty common. (I’ve also seen laptops that use Fn+F7 for the same purpose.)

Usually Fn+F8 cycles between the following three modes:

1. Laptop monitor only
2. Laptop monitor plus external monitor
3. External monitor only

Chances are you’ve got this “Break” key on your keyboard in the upper center (it might be located with the “Pause” key) and you’ve never used it. It sure doesn’t do much. Well, if you press that Windows key plus the Break key, you get the System Properties control panel, which (among other things) tells you how much memory your computer has. With a couple of presses of the Ctrl+Tab key to change tabs in the dialog box, you can view your hardware devices and make sure they’re working, change your computer name, or a few other administrative tasks.

Personally, I use this one many times a day: Pressing the Windows key plus the letter E runs the Windows Explorer, which lets you browse files on your computer.

Once you have the Explorer running, you can navigate the directory tree on the left with the arrow keys. Up and down move up and down the items; to expand one of the plus signs press the right arrow. Left arrow jumps up to the top of the current directory tree, and then pressing it again closes the current directory if you’re at the top of a directory.

Press Tab to cycle between the directory tree (on the left), the address bar (at the top, where you can type in a location such as “C:\music”), the file list (on the right), and the menu bar.

In the directory tree or the file list, pressing a letter jumps down to the next file or directory in the list that begins with that letter.

Remember, you can use Shift plus arrows to select files in a group. (You can also Ctrl+left click to select arbitrary files. You can press Ctrl+Spacebar to do the same, and keep the Ctrl held down while you use the arrow keys to move up and down the file list while moving to the next file.)

Press Delete to delete the selected file or directory (or more than one if you have selected more than one). Anything deleted will go to the trash. However, pressing Shift+Delete will delete the file permanently, without it going to the trash. You can also copy selected files by press Ctrl+C (and then Ctrl+V in a new directory to paste them, finishing the copy). Or, substitute Ctrl+X for Ctrl+C to move the selected files.

Most people know that if you press the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (which may be labelled “Prnt Scrn”) you’ll capture a screenshot of everything on your screen.

However, you may not know that if you press Alt+Prnt Scrn, you get a copy of only the currently selected window. You won’t get the taskbar or any other windows on your display. Then you can run a program (such as Microsoft Word or the Paint application included with Windows) and press Ctrl+V to paste in the screen shot.