How to turn off a laptop keyboard

How to turn off a laptop keyboard

Turning off your laptop keyboard is perhaps a little harder than it should be, but with good reason. It’s certainly not the sort of thing you’d like to do by accident. We’re going to show you how you can permanently disable your your laptop keyboard.

How to temporarily disable laptop keyboard

1. Head into your Start Menu, and type in Device Manager
2. Open up the Device Manager and find your way to Keyboards and hit the arrow to the left of it
3. Here you will be able to find your laptop’s keyboard. Right click on it and hit 'Uninstall'.

The keyboard will now be temporarily disable work until you have to restart your laptop, but when you turn it back on the machine will automatically reinstall the drivers for your keyboard. If you’d like to permanently disable the keyboard, we have a solution for that below.

How to permanently disable laptop keyboard

If you want to permanently disable the keyboard on your laptop it’s going to be a little more involved. You’ll have to turn off Windows' ability to automatically install the driver again; otherwise the keyboard will spring back into life every time you reboot your machine.

To permanently disable your keyboard do the following:

• Go to start, and into the search box type ‘gpedit.msc’
• Click on the Computer Configuration file, and then head into Administrative Templates > System, Device Installation
• Then go into Device Installation Restrictions. You’ll see a number of options on the right. Right click on Prevent Installation of Devices not described by other policy settings and edit this option, setting it to enabled

Now you’re done this, you can go back into your Device Manager and follow the steps at the top of this article. Uninstall the driver for your keyboard, and when you reboot your PC it will not automatically install it again, and the keyboard on your laptop will no longer function.

This is very much a permanent change, so there's one more important step to take if you might want to re-activate the keyboard at any point in the future. 

At this point, it’s a good idea to go back into gpedit.msc and revert the change so you’ll be able to install the driver again in the future should you so desire.