Disable power,sleep and hibernate keys

[Ste_Harve]

Hi all,

Is there a way that we can disable the power, hibernate and sleep keys on some newer keyboards? We've had a spate of kids pressing the keys and the machines shutting down causing great frustation for the kids.

Obviously we could buy new keyboards would would rather not as these areless than 3 months old.

Thanks

[elsiegee40]

Physically?

Take the key off, stuff something underneath and replace the cap?

[acrobson]

Have you tried the power options in control panel and via the screensaver options on the desktop?

Or if the keyboards require a certain set of drivers/software to make them more multimedia, can't you just un-install the extra apps and just leave them with basic drivers so the keys are automatically disabled and acts as a standard QWERTY keyboard.

It all depends upon what keyboard you have, such as Microsoft, kingston, Dell etc...

[Ste_Harve]

We could do it physically but there's abuot 100 of them to do. Would rather have a software solution.

They're just standard PS/2 keyboards, don't have any drivers installed. Haven't had a look at power options will give that a look and see what i can find.

[DSapseid]

Ive got the same and 65 new machines were orded for our new ict suite and all came with keyboards with these buttons on!! Havent had too much trouble you just get the muppets pressing it and saying my computer is broke! They wouldnt happen to be genius would they??

[Ste_Harve]

They are genius keyboards. Our kids find it funny to press a key to switch they PCs off. Just a shame they can't do it when they've finished on the machine!!!!

[mattx]

You should be able to control these aspects on the keyboard within the power settings in the control panel.
Logon as a admin or someone who can change these settings. These changes will be held in the NTUSER.DAT. You will then have to copy this over the top of the ALL USERS & DEFAULT USER accounts - [ also depends if you are using roaming profiles, I use mandatory ]
I have a NTUSER.DAT held on a server with all these settings set.
Run DELPROF and clear out the profiles from the PC / PCs.
I also delete the NTUSER.DAT from the LOCAL admin account, I then logon as the local admin so it picks up the new NTUSER.DAT from the DEFAULT USER account.
Any new user who then logs on with a mandatory profile will pick up the power settings from the DEFAULT USER account.
A bit long winded, [ I have mine all scripted ]

[OutToLunch]

I tried to do this a while ago with no joy when our new server turned up with a keyboard that had a power key just over the delete key. Not good when you're working at the server and suddenly shut it down midafternoon when your sausage fingers manage to miss delete! Ended up just binning the keyboard before I killed someone (or they killed me!)...

[webman]

Our last ICT room came with keyboards equipped with power-control shortcut keys too which was a nightmare. Fortunately for us we managed to get them all replaced with our supplier due to another problem with them all. And yes they were Genius ones as well.

[Geoff]

Either go to control panel -> power -> advanced -> Buttons then change the 'When I press the XX key...' to 'Do nothing'.

Or disable ACPI in the BIOS.

[tarquel]

Or disable ACPI in the BIOS.

Are there any cons to that tho geoff?

Nath.

[Geoff]

If the machine is dual core/hyperthreaded or SMP it'll probably BSOD.

[StewartKnight]

thats probably just about every machine less than 10 years old then!

[Geoff]

You can fix it by changing the HAL though. Also, some bios's will let you disable the ACPI Power functionality separately from all the other stuff. So it's still worth checking.

[Busybub]

Hi all,

Is there a way that we can disable the power, hibernate and sleep keys on some newer keyboards? We've had a spate of kids pressing the keys and the machines shutting down causing great frustation for the kids.

Obviously we could buy new keyboards would would rather not as these areless than 3 months old.

Thanks

Depends on ACPI compliance of your keyboards and motherboards (as Geoff mentioned) but it may be possible to do it using a custom scancode map which reassigns the function of the keys.

Try this:

Copy the following (between start and end) into a text file, save it with a .reg extension:


<start>

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,04,00,00,00,00,00 ,5E,E0,00,00,5F,E0,00,00,63,E0,00,00,00,00

<end>

Log in as an administrator and run the .reg file.
Reboot.

If that doesn't work, try it again with this:

<start>

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,04,00,00,00,00,00 ,37,E0,00,00,3F,E0,00,00,5E,E0,00,00,00,00

<end>

It may or may not work despite these being the standard codes for power key mapping - I use a different one for doing other stuff and it works fine but I've never been able to get this one running...