Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Disabling HP Quickplay buttons

As I wrote some weeks ago, I got a new laptop - a HP Pavillon dv6XXX. Well, everything works and I have no problems so I'm quite satisfied... but one thing really nerves me . There are some so-called quickplay buttons above the normal keyboard, look here:



The problem is that I often accidentally push it. Well, push it is too much, let's say smoothly touch it. This often occurs while coding and I push F5, F8 etc. to compile, build or test something. Then every time it the dvd programm slowly starts and I have to close it down. If this happens a few times, it really pisses me off so I tried to disable them.

Looking at the taskmanager, I noticed some HP programms running. Interesting sounded QPService.exe ("HP QuickPlay Resident Program") and Qlbctrl.exe ("HP Quick Launch Buttons"). But killing these two processes didn't helped.
The only way to solve our problem is to avoid even loading them, so we have to delete the registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
Be sure to make an backup of these keys to be able to re-enable it later! Here you have my 2 reg files: the first one disables QuickPlay by deleting the regkeys while the other one enables it by adding the regkeys.
I think that will be useful for some other nerved HP laptop users :-)
Use at your own risk! If they don't work and damage your system, don't blame me.

--- Download Reg Files ---

Update: It seems that I can't re-enable these buttons! So be careful - I don't take any responsibility.

Greetz, Sunshine

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Holidays are over :-(

Hm, what a nice time I had in August - 4 weeks free! Three weeks relaxing at home, meeting with friends, shopping, going to parties, relaxing and sleeping... But everything has an end and real life comes back. Next week my last oral exam in my minor subject, then I am going to begin with my study thesis - it will be about examining/monitoring the hypertransport bus system. Let's see how it will be - I hope easy :-)
I noticed that I haven't done anything in reversing for a long time but somehow I currently don't feel motivated to do something concerning this topic. But I dived into bezier curves and coded some nice applets (look in the java section of my site). An applet about b-splines is already finished - some little bugs have to be killed. In a few days I'll release two short articles about polygons with a nice applet so stay tuned and keep coding!