Lenovo Function/HotKeys are not working

[Tj Wiley]

Hi friends,
I have a Lenovo S41 Laptop. I was watching a video in full screen yesterday, and my laptop battery went below 20% and started its "ultra power save mode" on its own. I don't know what it did, but my screen darkened and my backlit keyboard turned off, which is normal. But my sound entirely went off from my speakers, and all of my hotkeys/function keys stopped working. I've restarted multiple times, nothing. No drivers pertaining to this issue are available as of yet for Windows 10, and I can't get into my BIOS. Apparently, there is a button on the side of my laptop that you hold which starts up the laptop into BIOS; I found the hole, but there's no button inside of it, it's just totally flat metal. So that's a no go. I don't know what to do. I can't turn up, down, or mute my volume. I can't Fn + Spacebar to turn on my backlights, I can't adjust my brightness. I can't do anything and I can't seem to find a fix for this anywhere. Also, I should mention that my Windows key works fine, all Ctrl + whatever keys work fine. I'd say it's locked or something, but Fn + esc doesn't do anything for me either. Hopefully you wonderful people can help me out.

Thanks a lot 🙂

 

[Reyaz123]

Turn off fast startup and reboot your pc, it should allow you into the bios settings again

http/www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-fast-startup-turn-off-windows-10-a.html

If you have Windows 10 64-bit or 32-bit, you can download the chipset drivers or touchpad/keyboard drives for your laptop model here:
http/support.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/lenovo-s-series-laptops/s41-70

 

[Tj Wiley]

Disabling fast start up still didn't allow my into the BIOS from startup. I completely turned it off and on a few times and nothing. I also updated all of the chipset drivers and keyboard drivers and still nothing.

 

[Reyaz123]

If this issue happened recently you could try system restore to put your computer back in the state that it was working fine before
http/windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows-10/windows-10-recovery-options

 

[Tj Wiley]

Any other ideas? It's still not fixed.

 

[Chris_ITAudit]

Sorry I am late to the game here, but maybe this will help out with those who have this problem. My laptop is locked so I cant even check BIOS. I did discover on my T440s that depressing the Esc+Fn keys activates/deactivates the hot key functionality. Thankfully, this time this solution worked.

 

[Tj Wiley]

To all of those who will come here in the future, Lenovo support couldn't fix it so I had to send it in for repair. They said it was a hardware problem, but didn't tell me specifically what it was.