On Nov 8, 2018, at 8:05 AM, Chris Hill <hillco@...> wrote:

Hello. There really is no way to know what you're getting with a mail-order laptop. Also, the big box stores aren't going to be beaten by much on the price of a large item like that, they over-price small stuff but are pretty competitive on the big stuff. Mail-order laptops aren't really worth the risk.


Now, as far as what you're dealing with, I've spent a lot of time in the last year looking at laptop keyboards. There are generally other ways to do what you need to do. For your home end, page up and page down, try holding down the fn key (usually it is either the left most key on the bottom row, or it is the second from the left and using the arrow keys. On my laptop there is also a special combination for the applications key, I believe it is fn plus the key just to the left of the separate arrows. You can always fall back on the applications combination that was around before the separate key, that was shift-f10.



Another sweet litttle trick manufacturers do is to make the up and down arrows as half-height keys, HP seems to like that one. The best keyboard I saw all year comes from Asus, and if I had to buy a laptop right now, I'd start looking there.

On 11/8/2018 05:55, Kimber Gardner wrote:
Hi All,

How do jaws users evaluate a keyboard on a laptop you are considering?
I'm talking about the presence (or absence) of keys that are necessary
to the functionality of jaws commands.

I received a new Lenovo Ideapad and was dismayed to realize that the
keyboard is missing not only the applications key but also the
dedicated home, end, page up and page down keys. Strangely, my old
Lenovo, the one I am typing this message on, has all these keys so it
never occurred to me to try and verify that the new one would also.
But now I'm wondering, how do you check the keyboard specs when
ordering a new laptop that you haven't actually had your hands on?

Before someone suggests an external keyboard let me say that I require
the portability of a laptop that doesn't necessitate dragging around
an extra keyboard. I also don't really want to remap a bunch of keys
to accomplish everyday functions.

So what do people suggest? Do I really have to drag myself over to
microcenter or some other store so I can actually touch the laptop I'm
considering? Is there another way?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Kim