Disabling the Sleep Button on an HP Keyboard

August 29th, 2011 by steve

For reasons only their engineers know HP designed a keyboard with a sleep button only millimeters away from the escape key.

Often the reason I am hitting the escape key is because I just hit the wrong key an instant before. HP’s brilliance in putting their propriety sleep key right beside the escape key increases the frustration, making me wait for the PC to re-awaken if I accidentally hit the sleep key.

All the suggestions I found online failed to disable this function of this keyboard, but finally — SOLVED!

Here’s my fix. Click the image to see a larger rendering.

It only took about a minute. Oh — and it took two screwdrivers.


2 Responses to “Disabling the Sleep Button on an HP Keyboard”

  1. alacy Says:

    So when you use the “power options” to configure power buttons and set the sleep button to “do nothing”, it still puts it to sleep? My Dell doesn’t have a dedicated sleep button I have to use Fn-Esc (or the shutdown option), but when I use the power options and configure the sleep button to do nothing then Fn-Esc does nothing.

  2. steve Says:

    Yep. The power options didn’t fix it. But those screwdrivers worked wonders!

    I figure it this way, mechanical engineers were the idiots who put that button in such close proximity to the esc key. Therefore, this was not a software engineer’s problem. It took a mechanical approach.

    😉