Apple Keyboards on Windows

Discussion in 'Computer Gaming Forum' started by pspwill, Oct 16, 2009.

  1. pspwill

    pspwill Spirited Member

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    I bought myself an aluminum wired Apple keyboard earlier today (awesome btw) to use on my windows pc. It all works pretty much great, the volume buttons and play/pause etc work after tinkering a little. The problem is though that I cannot figure out how to get the eject button to work. I've ripped the drivers form the boot camp cd and am using them but still no joy. Does anyone have any experience of this and knows how to get it working?

    Thanks, Will
     
  2. Jamtex

    Jamtex Adult Orientated Mahjong Connoisseur

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    Too much of a strain to press the eject button on the optical drive? What do you want the eject button to do?
     
  3. Kishan

    Kishan Spirited Member

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    hi,

    Not to hijack or anything but how would you go about taking a screenshot on a appple keyboard on Windows 7

    Thanks
     
  4. pspwill

    pspwill Spirited Member

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    @Jamtex, i just want to get all the keys working, not sure what il map it to yet.

    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1216 is how the keys are mapped in windows. Althoug you could just map the F13 key to print screen or w/e.
     
  5. alecjahn

    alecjahn Site Soldier

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    I, like Jamtex, am a little confused about the premise of the eject button, since ejecting a disc would be to take a disc out, which requires physical effort to retrive such an item, which would mask any reason not to use the one on the drive.

    Anyways. Is it perhaps a hardware function, the Apple eject, that is different in code completely than on an actual PC? Obviously Apple doesn't expect you to be using product X on a non-Apple PC, so if that were the case, they certainly wouldn't add that functionality.
    Maybe a custom driver would be necessary?
     
  6. pspwill

    pspwill Spirited Member

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    I would probably map it to the safely remove usb drive so it saves me a few clicks and doesn't destroy my data.

    The thing is though that Apple does expect you to use it on windows, because they provide a driver for it to use with Boot Camp (windows on mac computers) but still no eject button. AFAIK there are no custom drivers so i'm just gonna give up.
     
  7. Borman

    Borman Digital Games Curator

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    Some people dont have an eject button on their drive, so that could be a good reason.
     
  8. alecjahn

    alecjahn Site Soldier

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    I'd like to think an extreme majority of "PC" drives would all have a button.
     
  9. Borman

    Borman Digital Games Curator

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    Not if its hidden by the case :p Or a laptop. Or some of the all-in-one machines out there now.
     
  10. alecjahn

    alecjahn Site Soldier

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    Ye' darn kids and yer newfangled comvoluted computing machines!


    jkjkjkjkjkskflajsdklf
     
  11. Barc0de

    Barc0de Mythical Member from Time Immemorial

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    drive..without..eject button..

    that doesn't make sense, that's science fiction :p
     
  12. Jamtex

    Jamtex Adult Orientated Mahjong Connoisseur

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    You could always right click my computer, click properties > hardware > device manager. Click Disk Drivers to open it, plug in the device so it appears in Disk Drives, double click it, click policies then make sure that "Optimize for quick removal" is checked. I've not lost any data on memory cards, flash drives or USB hard drives just by unplugging them...

    You can try and remap the Eject key to something else using Sharpkeys or map it to run a program using Auto Hotkey!

    Steve jobs hated eject buttons, which is why the original apple macintosh had a software eject feature and ever since then (except for a few macs that were built when he wasn't around) all Macs have had software eject features for optical/magnetic media.
     
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2009
  13. pspwill

    pspwill Spirited Member

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    Sharp Keys does not recognise the Eject button when i press it and i cannot use AutoHotkey to program it because i don't know the keycode. I am already using AutoHotKey for the volume buttons. Im starting to think that the apple driver just does not accomodate the eject button. Unfortunately there are no 3rd party drivers (that are still in development).
     
  14. phate

    phate Enthusiastic Member

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    The Eject key on apple keyboards only works on Macs because it is mapped by the firmware (thats why the eject key works when a mac boots windows using bootcamp). Since a regular PC's BIOS doesn't have the code for that specific key on the keyboard its not going to work.

    The Eject key is akin to the Fn key on most notebooks.
     
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