My Acer 4250 came with rather annoyingly and pointlessly placed euro + dollar keys ‘inside’ the cursor key area.

Being a script monkey, I figured it would be rather useful to remap these keys to delete + backspace.

After much googling, the answer is to:

a) edit C:\Program Files\Launch Manager\MMKEYBD.CFG

comment out a couple of lines with “;” so that they look like this :

;Key 19 = 1,E0,33,E0,B3,F508,Euro Symbol
;Key 20 = 1,E0,34,E0,B4,F509,Dollar Symbol

this prevents acerware from hijacking these keys for its own purposes!

then download and install www.autohotkey.com

change the default script so that it reads

$SC133::Delete
$SC134::Backspace

add autohotkey to your startup folder, reboot and viola! remapped keys

There are two separate ways that you can fix this issue:

The first fix is quite simple – disable the touchpad. Sorry touchpad users Press Fn-F7 to turn it off. Remember you can easily plug in a usb mouse instead, or if you’re the geeky type learn to navigate through windows using hotkeys.

The second fix is to upgrade the BIOS to the latest version. This isn’t anywhere as scary as it sounds.

You want the file FBIOS3630.zip, which you can find here

Unzip the contents and run the file SWinFlash.exe – and point it to the file Z03_3630.WPH

If you’re the highly paranoid type, then before you do this create a factory restore disc via the Acer empowering framework. However this is an official patch, so unless you’ve done something truly strange to your laptop, then there’s no reason why updating the BIOS shouldn’t work.

Don’t ask me how this one made it past Acer QA :/