Disabling a laptop keyboard in place of a USB keyboard?

Question

I frequently plug a USB keyboard into my laptop to use instead of the laptop keyboard. However, when I do this, the OS (Windows Vista) then accepts input from both the laptop keyboard and the USB keyboard. I want to place the USB keyboard on top of the laptop keyboard and that might result in accidental keypresses if the laptop keyboard is still enabled. So, is there any way to disable the laptop's built-in keyboard when a USB keyboard is plugged in? My laptop is a Dell Inspiron.

Solution

You could create 2 batch files for enabling/disabling your keyboard using its device id with the command line tool devcon.

From Microsoft Support website:

The DevCon utility is a command-line utility that acts as an alternative to Device Manager. Using DevCon, you can enable, disable, restart, update, remove, and query individual devices or groups of devices

Then you could have shortcuts to these files on your desktop or on any other accessible location of your preference.

Comments

[rohan-patel]

Don't you have function key for that?

[Jez]

Nope; there's a function key to switch screen output, but not to disable laptop keyboard output (to my knowledge?)

[Piskvor left the building]

Good to know, thanks. (Perhaps there's a way to get notified of hardware plugs/unplugs, which would allow for automatic script execution? (I don't know if such notification API exists in Windows Vista, but I'd suspect it should))