How to remap/disable annoying HP Envy special function keys

A very kind Envy user has posted his solution to remapping the annoying Envy special function keys

http://www.simonsarris.com/envy-keyboard


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I bought an envy about a month ago and have been working through the usual new laptop quirks. There are plenty of hard-to-notice-until-bought pros and cons that I might pour over some time, but right now I'd just like to mention my findings with respect to the Envy Quick Launch keys that are located on the left of the keyboard.

By default, these keys open up a mail program, HP's MediaSmart SmartMenu, a web browser, printing, and the Windows calculator program. You can see them on the left side of the keyboard, with labels I'll explain in a moment:



There's no way in the HP software to customize the buttons, so I did a little bit of fishing around and found some useful information.
My original intent was to make a small program that would sit in the system tray and simply have a menu to disable all the buttons at will or re-enable them. The buttons are nice, but they aren't the most useful thing to have enabled when one is trying to play a full-screen game. I'd keep getting sent back to the desktop because I accidentally opened a calculator instead of pressing ctrl.

Making a small key-capture program I found out that the first odd-one out was the Print key, which literally just sends the key press forLeftCtrl and P. The second odd one is the "wave" looking key, the SmartMenu button, but I'll address that one later.

The others had strange key names: BrowserHome, calc.exe, and LaunchMail. At that point I decided to look for those names in the registry and came upon some interesting values:

There are 5 entries in a registry folder corresponding to some of the Quick Launch keys as well as mysterious nonexistant keys. First I'll mention the real keys, what they do, and how to change them.



Editing the keys

Go to the start bar in Windows 7 and type "regedit" and press enter. If you're unfamiliar with the Windows registry then please be careful, messing with values here can cause a lot of errors.

Navigate to the registry folder:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AppKey

In the folder you'll see more folders, the three we care about are:

15 calls for the Assocation of 'mailto'
18 calls for a ShellExecute of 'calc.exe'
7 calls for the Assocation of 'http' (opens the browser or program associated with http)
These are the mail, calculator, and internet buttons, respectively. If you want to change them, simply modify the values inside each folder. Associations will open the program that is tied to the protocol or file type. For these two buttons, the 'mailto' association opens Windows Live Mail (by default), and the 'http' association opens whatever browser is your default. ShellExecute on the other hand is the same as typing something into Run and pressing enter.

An example: Let's say you want the mail button to open Notepad: Go into the folder named 15, rename "Association" to "ShellExecute", double click ShellExecute to modify the key's data and enter "notepad.exe", replacing "mailto."

Want to disable a button? Just clear out the ShellExecute or Association data. For the mail button you would double click the Association and replace "mailto" with nothing.

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To simply disable them, find the key you want (15 is the mail key), double click where it says Association (or ShellExecute), and change it from "mailto" to nothing at all. That should be all that you need!
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What about the wave key?

The wave-looking key actually opens a program called 'HP MediaSmart SmartMenu.' You can uninstall this from Programs and Features in the Control Panel if you wish. I haven't yet found a way to do anything else with it.



What were those other registry entries?

16 calls for the Assocation of .cda, this seems to be a nonexistant key that was intended to be media-centric
17 calls a ShellExecute on ::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}, which is the ParsingName for "My Computer" in Folder Descriptions, so I suppose it was a My Computer button
These keys were probably programmed for but never implemented in the final Envy design.

None of this gives us an easy way to disable the keys temporarily, though, so I guess I'll have to release a small program later to let people temporarily disable and re-enable them on the fly.

Also, if anyone has any information about the Wireless On/Off key above the "+" key, please let me know. I'd reall like to find a way to temporarily disable that, or better yet only make it work when "fn" is pressed, but so far haven't found anything useful on the key.
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Can we change the calc key for ctrl and the ~ for F5?

 

good to know, i was planning on remapping these keys when i get a chance. pretty damn sloppy of HP to leave registry entries for keys that don't exist. not that any of these are needed in the first place... i mean calc, really? if you're the kind of person that needs to use calc alot you probably would have got a laptop with a built-in number pad. and a dedicated key for a email client? what the f? the only person i know who doesn't use webmail is my mom because she bought this ridiculous thing called Incredimail that has a butler that comes out and tells you a new mail has arrived, madam. and a dedicated key for your web browser.. as if clicking on the Firefox icon on your desktop is too much of a hassle. it's like the first thing you load anyway, and you keep it running, so why do you need a quicklaunch key? oh and let's not forgot the HP Media button, which links to some junky software that doesn't even matter because i reloaded Windows from scratch to get rid of all that. anyway i'm just going to map these keys to the same function as the keys they sit next to since I keep hitting these awesome quicklinks by mistake. the Envy has a good design aside from these stupid buttons, which are probably due to some dipshi+ in the marketing department.

 

This is great because I was just going to post a question about how to do this.

Thanks.

 

Excellent, just bought a HP laptop (rebranded Compac, I think) and these retched keys are VERY annoying...

What I would like is to re-assign the first 2 keys (calculator and printer) to CTRL-C and CTRL-V, the keys I use the most all dy.

Anyone know how to put these keys in the registry?

Tnx

 

That sounds complicated, have you tried this?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...your-quickplay-buttons-way-you-want-them.html

Even if it doesn't work, talk to Th3_uN1Qu3 and maybe he can help. As you can see in the fist page, he added nx9420 support after I gave him some info.