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Malfunctioning play/pause media key

Anonymous
2020-11-17T08:01:40+00:00

Alright I've had this issue for several weeks now and still haven't managed to figure out the issue so I'll just kind of list things in chronological order

  • Before the new(er) update, my internal keyboard broke due to liquid being spilled on it, and as I can't afford to have it replaced, I bought an external keyboard. I wanted to disable my internal keyboard as it was broken but that wasn't an option so instead, I replaced the driver with an incompatable one. Everything worked fine.
  • At some point the pause/play button (which on my internal keyboard was f10) broke off completely including the little rubber button part of it meaning it now doesn't get any input.
  • Then the new update happened making that hack of replacing the driver impossible as it would reinstall/fix itself each time and you can't change it without restarting even as a temporary fix.
  • At this time my computer became very buggy but the main issue was now if I play any media at all (music, videos, etc.) the play/pause key repeatedly is pressed and thus I can't properly listen/watch anything. I managed to disable this key's affecting my browsers but that's where my success has ended.
  • I've tried every trick in the book to disable or reroute that key specifically in hopes that would work but it hasn't stopped the issue (or even succeeded in disabling the correct key)
  • I've also tested this while my external keyboard is unplugged and the problem persists so it's definitely something having to do with my internal keyboard.

Does anyone have any idea what the issue is and how to actually fix it? If there's a way to just disable media keys (pause/play, skip, etc.) from working entirely with any apps or programs that would solve the problem it seems like but I have no idea how to do that. Forums I've painstakingly combed through have said there should be a check box to disable media keys under control panel and hardware/keyboard but i've scoured through any and all keyboard settings and found nothing like that.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-01-04T15:21:44+00:00

    I've had this problem with my laptop too (also spilled on the keyboard). Thanks to Jie WeiTan for pointing me in the right direction. His solution should work, however requires you to have autohotkey running in the background at all times. If you want to avoid this you can:

    1. Download KeyTweak.
    2. Disable the play/pause button (and any other buttons malfunctioning).
    3. Restart for it to take effect.
    4. Uninstall KeyTweak if you wish to do so and have your play/pause button permanently disabled. (unless ofcourse you redownload KeyTweak to enable it.)

    6 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2021-01-01T05:36:51+00:00

    Not sure if you're still stuck with the same machine, but you might be able to use autohotkey for this. Note: this is in theory, I personally have not tried disabling the media key myself.

    1. Download autohotkey
    2. Here a look its remapping page. Specifically this line: "To disable a key rather than remapping it, make it a hotkey that simply returns. For example, F1::return would disable the  key."

    3) Here's a list of recognisable keys. Media_Play_Pause should be the key that you should disable.

    4 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-07T07:54:19+00:00

    I tried disabling action keys in the BIOS and it still didn't solve the problem I am at a complete loss here as to what the problem is

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-12-03T22:27:11+00:00

    Sorry boosting this again because I'm still struggling with it and it's making my laptop difficult to use but I can't afford a replacement

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-19T20:51:53+00:00

    Still struggling with this has anyone else ever had this issue? It's a pain because I can only listen to/watch things now if they're on my browser bc that's the only place I can disable the media keys :(

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