Elitebook 840 G5 Keyboard

[Yaman6]

Hi,

i Bought the HP Elitebook 840 G5 secondhand, and installed windows 11 on my own.

i have now the following Problem: on the left on the action button bar, the keys on the  Right (Activate Hotspot this does turn Airplanemode on, (Screen?) i.g. Screenshare no Function , Accept and Decline a Call no function ) dont work at all like i know they are active Hardware wise they are Working. 

But i either dont understand how they work or the driver is messed up or something, can someone help me?#

Thanks and sorry for the bad English.

Greetings from Germany!

[Jupitero]

If you wish to use these buttons, you either need to install Microsoft Powertoys or Autohotkey, or any other tool that allows keyboard remapping.

Here's the background for these buttons and my personal rant:

Those three buttons are called what HP calls "Collaboration Keyboard". You can download the software from HP 840 G5 support page.

I highly recommend NOT to do that, though, since the Collaboration keys and the software was totally useless feature from the beginning.

It only worked with Lync, Skype for Business and Cisco Jabber. Lync was predecessor to Skype for Business, which itself was made obsolete by Microsoft just after some bright spark at HP came up with the Collaboration Keyboard idea. Answering or placing a call within SfB/Teams/Zoom is not any harder than finding the correct key in your keyboard, and many office users already had a call button in their headset for this.

HP totally failed with the Collaboration Keyboard thing and never supported the modern Teams / Slack / Zoom or any other products that could use these features. Collaboration keyboard was only in G5 and G6 laptops and they also sold full size USB keyboards with these 3 shortcut buttons. The Collaboration software does not allow remapping of these buttons to any other functions.

HP has many times tweaked the laptop keyboards, with poor results. G7 and newer laptops have a single extra "Programmable Key" which requires both hands to use because the combination is Fn+F12 unless you're "one of those people" who prefer action keys to proper Function keys. The software to assign this single key is 50+ MB in size which is ludicrously bloated for something that could be done in 1 MB or less - typical HP.

My old Zbook (G1) keyboard is still the best of the Elitebook/Zbook era. It's been constant downhill ever since with the removal of Insert and Print Screen buttons and changing of the layout every now and then.