F-Lock

The introduction of F-Lock was marked by criticism on several points. First, the behaviour was unintuitive: pressing a key such as F4 by default no longer had its normal meaning, so combinations such as Alt+F4 appeared not to work.

Secondly, the choice of secondary function assigned to each key appeared to be arbitrary: whereas F7 was the traditional key for spell-check (used notably by Microsoft itself in its Office products), F7 was assigned the function of "reply", and spell-check was assigned to F10. This caused strong criticism from some commentators.

Pressing F2 in Windows Explorer in attempt to rename a file would instead undo an earlier file operation, with potentially disastrous consequences if the actual effect went silently unnoticed.

Because of such concerns, a number of methods for disabling the F-Lock function appeared on the web.

Many Windows/PC users have found a workaround using Microsoft's Intellitype Pro software, which allows a user to assign keystrokes/macros to the function and accessory keys. For example, assigning a macro {Press F1} to the function key F1 renders the F-lock issue moot, since the OS will interpret the key press as F1 regardless of the F-lock state.

The new behaviours assigned to the keys are as follows: