I'm regarding all the hotkeys present on F1-F12, not the steam/record/macro buttons.
On my old HP laptop (eww, I know, but it was cheap) I could just press the buttons for what I needed-volume, brightness, mute, etc. It had pretty much the same layout-full kb with a number pad.
On this laptop I can only seem to access the hotkeys by holding Fn, which is super annoying. Also, num lock not being on by default when I power up is also irritating, as with windows 8 I have no choice but to either use a pw or pin, and to use a pin I have to activate num lock first.
I've looked in the bios but see absolutely nothing regarding what I want. Is there really no way to do it?