Strange change in behavior of home/F11 and end/F12 keys on Dell laptop

[berkeman]

The behavior of those two function keys at the top of my Dell Windows 10 laptop recently changed, and I'm trying to figure out how to change it back to normal. At the upper right of my keyboard there are these function keys with 2 functions apiece shown:

prtscr/F10 home/F11 end/F12 insert/FnLock

The default behavior for the home and end keys was as you would expect, letting me go straight to the top or bottom of web pages and some documents. But a week ago or so, the home button default behavior apparently changed to F12 (without holding the Fn button down to select the alternate function), which toggles the window to maximize or go back to normal. And pressing the end button toggles the display to HTML mode and back again when pressed a 2nd time.

Does anybody know why that would have happened? With some Google searching I was seeing something about that FnLock (Function Lock) feature and button, but pressing the button with or without the Fn button did not seem to change this home-end button behavior.

Thanks for any ideas...

 

[pbuk]

You can probably toggle this behaviour by holding down the fn key and pressing esc. If the state resets after rebooting you may have to change a BIOS setting.

 

[berkeman]

You can probably toggle this behaviour by holding down the fn key and pressing esc. If the state resets after rebooting you may have to change a BIOS setting.

Hah! Thanks very much, that fixed it (at least for now). I was incorrectly thinking the little padlock under the "insert" key was the FnLock padlock, but you are correct, it is overloaded on the Esc key instead.

 

[pbuk]

I was incorrectly thinking the little padlock under the "insert" key was the FnLock padlock

Nah, that'll be the NumLock padlock! I'm not sure when keyboard designers decided it would be more fun if we all had to guess these things.