Disable some hotkeys in Win 7 Home Premium?

Topic

New Reply

I use a virtual desktop program and have assigned the hotkeys Ctrl-Win-1, Ctrl-Win-2 etc to activate the different desktops. This is an old habit, deeply ingrained in muscle memory and I don’t want to change it!

On a new Win7 Home Premium laptop those keys are pre-assigned to launch the various programs pinned to the taskbar. I want to re-assign them to match the layout on my desktop machine.

Under Win 7 Pro / Ultimate it can be done using the local group policy editor (gpedit.msc) – but this is not available on Home versions. I don’t know the registry locations to do it manually.

Any suggestions as to where to look? Got a favourite hot-key management program?

Reply | Quote

Replies

Haven’t used it but this link purports to show how enable gpedit on Windows Home Premium.
http://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-group-policy-editor-gpedit-msc-in-windows-7-home-premium-home-basic-and-starter-editions/

Jerry

Reply | Quote

I believe Keytweak would allow you to make the registry changes very easily.

Bruce

Reply | Quote

Bruce, Jerry, thank you for the replies.

I followed the link in Jerry’s post and now have gpedit.msc enabled in Win7 Home But I then discovered that it has a single setting to enable/disable All Win-X hot keys – while I only want to remove a few of them – others like Win-d and Win-R I use frequently.

Keytweak suggested by Bruce will map one key to another character – but I was unable to make it work with special keys or with key combinations.

Any other suggestions?

Reply | Quote

Sorry about the unuseful steer towards Keytweak: I thought it could change keyboard shortcuts too, but apparently not.

Bruce

Reply | Quote

In the hope it will help someone else in the future – after some registry diving, and taxing my GoogleFu to the maximum I discovered this:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrrentVersionPoliciesNoWinKeys
Set to 1 disables all Win+x key combinations

To disable individual keys open Regedit (normal caveats apply) and navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced

Create or edit an Expandable String Value called DisabledHotkeys (which does not exist by default) and add the numbers/letters you want to be available (ie not grabbed by windows).

So changing DisabledHotkeys to “12R” will prevent explorer from binding Win+1 Win+2 and Win+R.

You need to log off or reboot to force Windows to re-read the registry for this to take effect. Some more details here:
http://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/shell/explorer/globalhotkeys.htm

Reply | Quote

You could try SharpKeys as an alternative. I haven’t used it for many changes, but it has always delivered what I wanted, and it is extremely simple to use.

Garth

Reply | Quote