The caps lock key is one of those remnants of another age of computers, back when people used to shout at each other more often. Since it’s not entirely useful anymore we’ll learn how to disable it. If you aren’t interested in the explanation you can skip to the bottom for the registry codes.

Windows doesn’t have a default setting to allow for disabling the key, so what we have to do is re-map the key to something non-existent so as to completely disable it.

Here’s the format of the binary data, with the important parts in bold and various colors:

00000000 00000000 02000000 00003A00 00000000

Here’s how it works:

• The first 16 zeros are just there to waste space.
• The “02″ in bold represents how many keys you are going to re-map plus 1. (It really represents the length of the data, but whatever)
• The orange bolded “0000″ is the key we actually want Windows to map TO, which in this case is nothing, or 0.
• The blue bolded “3A00″ is the key we are mapping from, in this case the caps lock key.
• The next 8 zeros are there to waste space as the null terminator.

You can map between multiple keys by incrementing the “02″ and then adding another of the colorful bold blocks in the middle. The 3A00 in the mix is the scan code. For example, if you wanted to disable the caps lock key and then change scroll lock into a caps lock key:

00000000 00000000 03000000 00003A00 3A004600 00000000

Now that you’ve learned how these things work internally. Let's get things started...

BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY FIRST!!

To disable capslock copy the following lines to notepad and save it as "KillCaps.reg"

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

To change the Capslock to Ctrl copy the following lines to notepad and save it as "CapstoCTRL.reg"

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

To disable keyboard remap copy the following lines to notepad and save as "DisableRemap.reg"

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=-

To change Capslock to Shift key copy the following lines to notepad and save as CapstoShift.reg"

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,2a,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

After you have created the .reg files double click them to add it to the registry

Remember you will need to reboot for this to take effect.