I wonder if there's a program out there that will let me reprogram my extra keyboard buttons (the shopping cart, the help button, the search button, the info button, the compaq button etc.) with programs of my choice?

I have a clean windows install now, and even though i have a compaq machine, it runs like a well-built generic machine ever since I got all the crap out. Unfortunately, I have this row of buttons that don't do anything anymore .

Is there a program that will let me bind useful programs to these buttons? (like photoshop, firefox, etc.)

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.



[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 03, 2004).]

I dunno. All of my keyboards with extra butunz had their own CD which controlled them. Is there anything in the keyboards section of the control panel?

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Violets are blue, roses are red, living like this we were already dead.

nope, I'm just using the generic keyboard driver. The compaq driver wouldn't make the buttons work b/c the programs that each button is supposed to trigger are not installed. (this is plain vanilla Windows XP corporate, not the b@stardized compaq OEM edition of XP)

That is, Assuming I could even find the compaq keyboard driver. Those recovery cds are hatefully cryptic with a riduculously complicated file structure.


Ideally, I would reverse-engineer the driver and make my own program based off of it's source, but I have no idea how to do this.

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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 03, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited June 03, 2004).]

What you need to do is to write a keyboard hook, which will process keyboard messages before they are sent to the target windows. There are lots of examples out there on how to do this, but I'll willing to provide more details if you want.

Any idea on how I would do this? Undoubtedly, i would have to write a program, right? I currently have Visual Basic 6 enterprise edition, but I could possibly obtain a copy of Visual C++ if I had to.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

I've done something very similar to it before, except I did it in C++. I know it can be done in VB also, but I don't know the specifics.

buy a new keybord, or better yet, buy a new computer that is not a compaq ****puter.

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no, b/c i want to use the buttons for something useful. I have 8 of these buttons, and that's 8 programs I can launch from the keyboard if I can pull this off.



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Old aunts used to come up to me at weddings, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, "You're next." They stopped after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

Any time i've had those extra keys and the right driver, i could change what they did in the keyboard applet in control panel..

Erm.. blink. Ok i can't change the normal ones [www, mailicon,&c] under xp it seems.. just the numbered ones.. how weird.. i know i could in 2k and pretty sure in 98.

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NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

[This message has been edited by Dormouse (edited June 04, 2004).]

Programming it isn't all that hard. Just take all the buttons out and put them in different places.

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