I really like my Lenovo ThinkPad W500, and I bought it well before Hanselman bought his. The only real issue I have with it is its keyboard. Not the keys themselves (which are pretty nice for a laptop) but rather their location, specifically, the Home / End / Insert / Delete keypad. It’s kind of hard to see at the picture but if you look carefully you’ll see their rather awkward location at the right top corner of the keyboard.
The way I solved this issue is by using a great utility called Key Mapper. It maps keys by adding Registry entries – no need for yet another resident program in your system tray.
As I said in my analysis of my keyboard usage habits, I use Home / End a lot and I like my Delete key not far from my cursor keys. So I figured what I need is to map the Back and Forward keys (the ones above the cursor keys), to Home and End correspondingly. I also mapped my Right Control key to Delete. I may also map the Context Menu key (the one to the left of the Right Control) to Insert, but let’s see if I really need that.
The only trick (and the reason for this post) is getting the mappings to work on Windows 7. As Key Mapper developer says on his blog, Windows 7 dropped support for per-user mappings. Thanks God we still have so called boot mappings which are essentially per-machine, and Key Mapper does support them. Run Key Mapper as administrator, switch to the boot mappings view (Mappings \ Show \ Boot Mappings), then add your mappings normally and reboot your machine.
