FN key volume control older Mac pro

I have an six year old or so Intel Mac Pro. A few days ago my old key board has a partial failure. Some of the keys on the left side of the keyboard failed to work. I went to best buy and bought a new slimline keyboard, which seemed to work fine except for the "fn" key which seems to not work on my computer. Biggest problem is not being able to control the sound volume. I cannot get the volume to rise enough to hear music, movies, etc. I cannot get the volume grapic to even appear on the screen .Unfortunately this problem was noticed after I had chunked the old keyboard. I have tried adjusting volume in system preferences, to no avail. I am running 10.5.6 OS. Any one have any clue as to how I can get my volume to come back short of finding and older used keyboard? Very frustrating indeed. Thanks for your help. Guitardo


Never mind. Blasted the PRAM and got my volume back. Using an external speaker set up so controlling the volume from the keyboard is not that critical as long as I have some volume. Seemed to come back to full out put. Still. some hints or suggestions about the fn key could be helpful

What exact keyboard did you buy? I assume you got a Mac-specific one? It may well be defective. An easy way to see this is to run the keyboard viewer. Go to:

Now press the fn key. If it is working, you should see the corresponding key "activate" in the on-screen keyboard also. If this test does show that the key press is being recognized, then there may simply be a bad preference file somewhere. If it doesn't show it as being recognized, then chances are the keyboard is defective.

Also... going back to System Preferences > Keyboard... do you have the option selected to "Use all F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys"?

Take note if you purchased a new Apple slimline wired keyboard (aluminum), that it will not work correctly unless you're using at least OS X version 10.6.8. That information should have been included with the keyboard or on the box. Only the older Apple aluminum slim line keyboards will work with your version of OS X.