I use a MacBook from early 2009 and am running OS X 10.6.7.
Pressing the “fn” key and an F1-F12 key is supposed to produce the “function.” Hence fn + F8 is supposed to open the Spaces display.
I don’t know if I hit a mystery key somewhere or what it is, but pressing the fn button at some point stops having an effect. I need to reboot the system in order to get the fn key to do its job again.
Do you know the cause of this issue and how I can fix it?
Thanks!
Hrm. I’ve not encountered that on my 09 MacBook Pro, but I’ll try and poke around a bit.
I’ve not encountered this problem, but the preference for function key actions is set in the Keyboard tab of Keyboard & Mouse in system preferences. When you next encounter this failing, try going there and checking/unchecking the ‘Use F1/F2 keys as standard function keys’ option to see if that fixes the problem.
OB
There are two settings. Either the keys by themselves do things like adjusting the volume or brightness or whatever and the Fn key makes them act as function keys, or vice-versa. This can be changed in System Preferences.
To expand on the previous answer, when that checkbox is checked, pressing f1, f2, etc alone behaves like a normal function key (not to be confused with the fn key), pressing them in combination with the fn key does the special Apple functions. If it is not checked, then pressing them alone gives the special function and pressing them with the fn key gives normal f1,f2,f3, etc.
In other words, the effect of the fn key depends on whether that box is checked or not.
Thanks, guys, but it’s not that. It’s that they lose their Fn functions altogether unless I reboot. For example, right now the brightness key is F2. Checking that box controls whether I need “fn” to increase the brightness. BUT, the F8 key does not fulfill its spaces function no matter what I do.
If I reboot, those functions come back. But eventually I hit something or something happens, and they disappear.
Probably not the answer you want but I would reinstall OS X. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to take it in.
But the brightness, volume, iTunes controls, etc., never disappear.
When Macs start doing weird shit like this, it’s probably a good idea to run Disk Utility and repair permissions on the boot disk. This fixes most of the wonky stuff that happens for seemingly no reason.
If you don’t have an app like Onyx installed, do so and it will take care of the OS housekeeping for you.
Did you check to see what your settings are under the Exposé & Spaces system preferences?
Also try resetting your PRAM.