hi. i needed a cheap replacement keyboard and settled for the kensington comfort type usb one. it works fine but it has the layout of a pc. the scroll lock and pause keys control the contrast. my question is there are a few less keys than the apple keyboards so is there a way to control the volume with this keyboard? thanks!
imac intel 17" 1.5g old version,
Mac OS X (10.4.7)
No, I don't think so. The recent Apple keyboards have special functional keys. You can set them to control those functions, or act as regular F-keys. A non-Apple keyboard would act like the Apple keyboard set to use F-keys. You can use the F-keys to control some functions; screen brightness decrease/increase is F14/F15. But not sound volume. You can see all the available F-key functions in System Preferences +Keyboard & Mouse+ pane +Keyboard Shortcuts+ tab.
However, I did discover something recently. You can +put focus+ on the +status menus+ in the menu bar by pressing Control-F8 on the keyboard. This selects the leftmost Apple-supplied status menu in the menu bar (status menus are the little icons lined up along the right side of the menu bar). So if you move the +sound volume+ status menu to be the leftmost status menu, Control-F8, will highlight it. Then, you can press the up and down arrows to control the sound volume, and Return when done.
That's the best I can offer for controlling sound just from a regular keyboard.
Note: You can move your status menu icons on the menu bar by pressing the Command key and then dragging the status menu icon.
You can use a key mapping utility such as the freeware
Spark to map the volume controls to function keys or other keyboard shortcuts. I've been using Spark for this sort of purpose for a long time and it works quite well. If you try it and need help creating your shortcuts, post back.
If you download Spark and like it, please consider donating to the developer to encourage further development.
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