K90 Media Keys Don't Work in Game?

Hi,

I recently bought the K90 and have been quite enjoying it. However, I can't seem to get the media control keys to work (pause/next/last/stop, the volume wheel works fine as does the mute) while I am in a full screen game. Is this something I can change? I don't have the program for the macro keys installed as when I tried it earlier it stopped the backlights from working so I don't really want to try that again if possible. Thanks!

This thread should fix it for you.

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=111492

This is one of the first results when I google "media keys not working in game". I've finally figured out why this happens and found a solution. I would have posted this here anyway, but it seems like fate that I am since I bought a K70 today (literally today). This doesn't seem to be specific to any particular brand of keyboard, I've seen this problem with pretty much every brand out there.

Media keys working in some programs but not others (like games) is a windows permissions issue.

After a whole lot of trial and error, I realized that my media keys don't work when one program is being run as an administrator but the other isn't.

For example if I'm running a game (let's say league of legends) as an admin, but I'm not running my music player as an admin, the keys will not work. However if I run BOTH programs as an admin, my media keys work again!

Please note that disabling UAC does not fix this issue.

Essentially when you hit an input it's sent as the user of the active window, and other users ignore that input. So if your admin'd game is in focus and you hit the play/pause key, it sends that to all other admin'd programs, but not the normal-user programs like your media player.

This is also why sometimes you can't use extra mouse buttons in games. My ASUS mouse "driver" is actually a program that runs when the user logs into the program (which is really annoying BTW, since I have to wait a few seconds while it disables and re-enables my mouse). This program is run as the user (not admin), so I couldn't use my thumb buttons in admin'd games. After elevating it to admin, mouse function was restored. Microsoft intellitype drivers for my old MS keyboard had the same issue.

So you have a few ways of tackling the issue. The most straightfoward is to just log into your computer as the administrator account (google how to do that).

Otherwise you can see if there's a way to run the game without needing to elevate it to admin status. The big culprits are MMOs and MOBAs like league of legends which need to patch a lot. If they're installed in "Program Files" they need admin rights to edit the files and apply patches. Try installing them elsewhere. Other than that piece of broad advice, google is your friend. This is probably the best solution.

Another option is to escalate all the relevant programs to admin status to match the game (ie run your media player as admin). This can cause problems with controls while you're in non-admin programs though (the problem goes both ways). If you decide to go this route, you can use compatibility mode (right click->properties) to make a program always run as admin.

Hope this helps anyone else out there trying to find a solution.