Lotus Guru

1 - Alas, the one key not on my Thinkpad (and I always wondered why )

2 - And what if the Access IBM button doesn't bring up anything?

3 - Ah, but all is not lost. I too have a Thinkpad, and although it's a curious omission to what is otherwise by far the best laptop keyboard I've ever touched, you can easily map another key to do the job.

There may be different approaches depending on the vintage of your machine, but my Late-2004 model has a blue "Access IBM" button above the keyboard that when pressed opens up an IBM-specific configuration panel. To get to the mapping functions, I press this button, then click "Configure" - "Manage Keyboard & pointing devices" - "Map keys to functions". The rest is straightforward. I've got the Windows key mapped to my right ctrl key.

Enjoy!

4 - Mandy, if your particular Thinkpad at least still has the IBM ThinkPad/ThinkVantage utilities, what you're looking for is something called the "Keyboard Customizer Utility". I have both a T42 and an older T30, and there are slight variations in how you find this utility between them. Yours may be different yet. If you go to the Start Menu and look for program groups called "ThinkPad" or "ThinkVantage", you may find it listed there. If not, try going to the file system and look in the C:\Program Files\ThinkPad\Utilities folder for a program called TpKmapAp.exe.

I should note that on the T30, if I modify the keyboard settings, they are wiped out after I restart the machine. Haven't figured out why. The T42 has not problems.