This is pure troll-baiting, but I've long worked (struggled?) in a mixed Mac/PC world, and the best thing I love about Macs anymore is that, well - they are PCs. Although the price tag certainly reflects the features, my 2-year old MacBook Pro (MBP) has a dual-core, 64-bit CPU, has 4gigs of DDR2, and has the best in USB and Firewire connectivity. I fit easily into any cliquish computer-user group; Mac lovers across the cafe smile warmly at the sight of the softly glowing apple on the back of my screen, while I can share a conspiratorial chuckle with the PC-loving nerds as I boot up into Vista Ultimate.

The Problem

When sitting at my desk, with my external peripherals arrayed around me, I'm in heaven. Nothing is lacking, and there would never be any indication that I'm using anything other than a fully-equipped PC. Those who have gone back and forth between PCs and Macs know that the keyboards are not exactly the same. But my Microsoft keyboard works beautifully while my computer runs as a Mac or PC, with subtle, secondary icons on the keys to note how they work for the Apple operating system.

The story changes when I unplug, however. All first-time notebook users will remember their early days getting into 'real work' on that inaugural notebook, when their fingers start to fumble and stumble looking for the keys they could find all-too-easily on a full-sized, desktop keyboard. But for a MBP owner unplugged from the standard keyboard, and running windows. Things really start to look ugly, fast. It's not just that those keys are not in the places where they usually are, or that they require extra button-presses for what were single keys before; It's that as far as one can tell, those keys simply do not exist at all. I'm talking about keys like Print Screen, Scroll Lock, the Application key and of course, the Windows key.

The Solution

Some of these are simple, and the first in the list below is not only simple, but ironically apropos. However, as I go down the list, I come to two I actually discovered totally by accident, and which are not at all documented on the Apple BootCamp site. Actually, they are documented - as not existing. So, without further ado, here's the list:

Notes

¹ This includes all combinations using the Alt key, such as Control-Alt-Delete
² My keyboard has the 'Enter' key, whereas some have instead an extra Option/Alt key. I do not know what the behavior would be on those MBPs, so I include both entries.
³ For those who can use the 'Insert' key in this manner, the key combination works just like the Insert key in all ways, including using it for 'Paste' by pressing Shift-Fn-Enter (instead of shift-insert)
⁴ This is not a MBP shortcut at all, but a Windows shortcut. The 'Application' key on Windows lets you access the right-click context menu for a selected item from the keyboard. this is very useful for those like me who want to keep their hands on the keys while that's where they are, rather than switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard while performing tasks. However, for MBP users without any peripheral input devices, this is even more important; The MBP has only a single button on its track pad, making this shortcut a necessity at times.

Hopefully that list will help someone out there in Google-land. If you know of any useful shortcuts I did not mention for the MBP built-in keyboard, feel free to let me know.