Disabling Windows keys in Windows NT
After having grown up with "Standard" PC and AT-style keyboards, I have never managed to get accustomed to one of Bill's inventions from a few years ago: the Windows Keys on my keyboard.
Do I hear you chiming in? Oh yeah, these disdainful useless keys that always get in the way! The one reason that we all can't reach the curly braces efficiently, at least not on a German keyboard! Oh, how annoying! But read on...
Lo and behold, the cure to all this misery is readyly available. In their endless foresight, Billy's boys have made provisions to remove this evil from our lives: In the bottomless depths of the Windows Registry there are some magic switches. Flip them and thou shalt be saved.
Simply load and execute this heavenly reg-script here. After saving this script somewhere on your hard disk, right-click on it in Windows Explorer and select "Merge". That's all. Obviously, you can make this change with regedit or regedt32, too.
This very small script adds or modifies one registry key (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map). The settings in there disable the unwanted keys. Here's the scripts contents, in case you prefer to know what you're doing to your registry beforehand like I do:
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,5b,e0,00,00,5c,e0,\ 00,00,00,00
Changing the caps-lock behaviour in Windows NT
Then, most people prefer to undo the caps-lock status by hitting the shift key, not the caps-lock key again. Remember your typewriter? Remember DOS? Why did they change it? Again, a small change to the registry does the trick.
Just add a DWORD entry named "Attributes" with value 0x00010000 to each of the keyboard layouts you use. The layouts can be found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts. Candidates are:
A small reg-script here sets the required value for the German layout (00000407). Change the number to make it work for your keyboard layout.
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\00000407] "Layout Text"="German" "Layout File"="KBDGR.DLL" "Attributes"=dword:00010000
This only works with SP4 or later installed.
Source of this information: c't 26/2000, pg. 203 (www.heise.de/ct)
| This page was last changed on October 18th, 2002. © Matthias Gärtner 2002 |