One of life’s little irritations is the Caps Lock key.

It is a hangover from the old days of the typewriter, where you would press the shift key right down and then press the lock to hold it down.  Of course, in the world of computers, it’s a simple toggle switch that is very easily tapped, and THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU HAVE WRITTEN EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, which is a right pain.

I have a habit of accidentally striking the Caps Lock, and I find it really irritating.  What’s worse, there is little requirement for the key these days, especially with the style of writing I use.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could disable it?

I had a search around, and my prayers have been answered.

I found a very small, very elegant little program that sits quietly monitoring the Caps key and which toggles it back to normal instantly if it is tapped.  In effect, The Caps Lock key on my keyboard now does nothing. 

Suppose though I want to use all uppercase?  Then all I have to do is tap Alt + Caps Lock and my keyboard is back to normal.  It is simple, quick and efficient.  It also counts the number of times the Caps key is struck, and so far it has saved me eleven times.

If you suffer the same slings and arrows of the redundant key then you might like to try installing the program.

It is available here.  It is a mere 17Kb zip file, including licence and Readme.

It claims to work on all Windows systems up to XP, but you can take it from me that it works in Vista too.  I can’t speak for Windows 7, but maybe someone would like to try it and let me know?

Of course, it’s many thanks to the developers.  They are going to save me a lot of hair tearing.