Gaming Notebooks

KGy · ‎02-01-2025

Dear HP Support,

I've just bought a HP Victus 16-r0000nh laptop for it's good price/value ratio. I'm not a gamer but a developer who needed a power laptop with 32GB RAM. For the first glance I liked the keyboard for its well-separated cursor keys and the proper numpad, but then I realized that it's quite far from perfect, as it has neither right Ctrl, nor primary Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys, as the latter ones can be accessed as key combinations or with NumLock turned off. In return, it has a couple of less useful keys such as the dedicated Omen and the Calculator buttons. Carrying an extra keyboard around is out of the question in my case.

Being as a non-gamer, I uninstalled the Omen Gaming Hub software right away, and tried to reassign the keys for something productive. I could use MS Power Toys to bring the right Ctrl back and replace the Calc button, but unfortunately it does not recognize the Omen key. As I learned, I'm not the only one with my issue:

And these are just the HP forums, but folks are complaining also on Reddit, JustAnswer, SuperUser and other technical forums. HP support tends not to answer these questions, except when the problem is that the user wants to restore the Omen key's original functionality.

I have also found a GitHub project, dedicated to this issue, which managed to map the Omen key to F24 by the HP System Event Utility system service, which then could be recognized by Power Toys. Unfortunately, this solution is not working anymore. Being as a developer I tried to find some public API for HP System Event Utility with no success.

It's almost as if HP intentionally sabotaged every way to reuse the Omen key for anything useful. Dear HP, if this is really the case (e.g. due to some agreement constraint with the Omen software team), please let them understand that this is highly counterproductive (just see the complaints everywhere). As for myself, for example, I'm already quite sure that my next laptop will be a Dell again, though I own this HP only for a few weeks only.

But please prove me wrong and provide a simple solution to remap the Omen key. Or at least provide a public API for the HP System Events tool that makes this possible for a developer. Btw. I think remapping should rather be a BIOS option ideally, because a PowerToys-like remapper is still suboptimal as it always should be executed on OS startup (with Administrator privileges to work also in elevated mode), and it doesn't work in VMWare and in similar softwares.

I highly doubt that anyone would complain, including real gamers, if the hotkey for Omen Gaming Hub could be reconfigured to use some Fn+... or Win+... key combination instead.

I really hope you hear the voice of the HP owners' community this time.

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