Kensington Wireless Presenter

Hey up,

We have a few of these Kensington Wireless Presenters (model 33374) which teachers seem to like. Last year, one of the teachers using one said that there was a fault with it and that it was bringing up a dialogue box. Upon further investigation, it seems that when you press the laser pointer button, it also sends a signal to press F5 on your laptop. Which is quite annoying if you're pointing at a webpage (refresh) or a word document (search).

I thought this was a really wierd fault so contacted Kensington who asked me to send it back to wherever we bought it from. We just got a replacement back at the beginning of term, but this one has started doing the same thing.

After some research, it seems that it isn't a fault as such and that all the wireless presenters in this range do this!! Someone "solved" this by disabling the F5 key, which isn't really ideal. Does anyone else have any ideas what we could do to solve this very annoying problem?

Thanks :)

I agree the F5 functionality is ridiculous. It's intended to start a presentation (given the remote is designed the powerpoint, hence the stop button sends "B" blanking the screen), although surely if you are loading a presentation up, you would do it the normal way with a mouse and just press F5 on the keyboard?!

I can't understand their logic there, such a shame for a great device.

Doesn't help in terms of an answer to your query though - simply disabling the F5 key is the best I have seen in terms of a workaround.

Ahh well, I'll probably tell the teacher just to do stuff in powerpoint then. I guess that solves the problem too. Thanks for the reply :)