Home and End keys not working in Windows 7?

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KendallB

Member
I finally just purchased Parallels 8 to upgrade my Parallels 7 setup, as the issues I had before with odd key mappings for keys like Cmd-H are now fixed. Thanks!

Alas as soon as I started to actually use it, I discovered some more problems. It seems that for some reason the Home and End keys on the extended Mac keyboard are not working correctly in Windows 7 under Parallels? The home key does nothing, and the end key appears to bring up some kind of right click content menu? Normally these used to work just fine in Parallels 7 (as far as I can tell; I have been using VMware for the last six months due to the issues with key mappings in 7).

Any idea why this is happening and how to fix it? I am back to VMware for now, but I would like to go back to running Parallels again if I can.
 
Well clearly nobody in support is reading this forum. Oddly, the home/end keys work just fine on my VM at home on my MacBook Pro. Same basic configuration, but the VM at work and at home have evolved over time separately. So they are not identical.

However yesterday I noticed that Alt-T (or Cmd-T which should map to Alt-T) is not working properly on my home VM! WTF.

Clearly there are some really strange keyboard mapping problems with Parallels 8. So this new version is another step forward and two steps backwards. Back to VMware for a while again I guess, hoping a patch update will come out to fix this ... one day I will probably just give up and stick with VMware forever and never come back.
 
Guys, in order to provide you with proper solution, we need some details:
1. In what view modes does this issue happen? Is this behavior the same in Coherence/Window/Full Screen modes?
2. Please try to reproduce the issue and submit the problem report ID to us: click on Help>Report a Problem (post the ID here)
 
1. It happens in full screen mode, as that is the only mode I use. I assume it happens in the other modes but I have not tested it. I can do that if you wish.

2. I can reproduce the problem on demand, but I don't really know how you can do the same. The problem is it does not seem to happen the same from work machine to home machine. On my work machine, the home/end keys don't work. On my home machine Cmd-T does not work (but I have not verified if it works on my work machine or not; I will do that also). I get some other key sequence instead which is different in each case.

3. Posting on here is not enough to submit a problem report?
 
Ok, so the problem with Alt-T was easy to figure out once I took a look at the way Parallels 8 sets up key bindings. There is a 'Windows' profile which wants to do all the fancy footwork of mapping Cmd-Whatever keys to Ctrl-Whatever keys, which handily remaps Cmd-T to Ctrl-T, which is not what I want for Visual Studio! Since I really need Alt-T.

I fixed this by simply making my own key binding profile and getting rid of all the bindings except for re-mapping the Cmd and Option keys to Alt and Windows keys. Then I do all my key mappings within Windows as I normally do, using AutoHotkey. This way I can make sure Alt-T maps to 'New Tab' for say Firefox, but for Visual Studio it still works as the regular Alt-T option.

I have no idea why the machine at work has been having issues with the Home and End keys, but it does not do that on my machine here at home. Maybe the VM is messed up at work or something; I will find out when I give this a try tomorrow.

I just installed Windows 8 under Parallels and have been working on setting up my dev environment in it. I have also been setting it up in parallel with VMWare 5, so I can have fresh installs under both virtual machines in case I decide to stick to on or the other. At the moment I have to say Parallels blows the doors off VMware when it comes to performance! Seems the graphics performance is faster in Parallels, but I really noticed it doing intensive network disk stuff. No idea why, but copying from a Macintosh folder in Parallels was like 10x faster than under VMware, and even local disk seems quicker. So at this point, unless I run into any roadblocks, I am pretty sure I will be back to using Parallels again. So much has improved in v8!

And for whatever it is worth, Windows 8 is way faster than Windows 7 ever was in a VM. Not sure if it is due to the 2D graphics engine changes, or the way they simplified the UI in desktop mode (no transparency, shadows etc), but it is clearly a lot faster. I am going to enjoy Windows 8 as my development platform a lot more than I did with Windows 7 :)
 
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