Disable Targus PowerPoint Remote Buttons

February 16, 2010
A company called Targus makes remote controls designed for use with PowerPoint presentations. They allow you to control your presentation from some distance away from the actual computer running the show. While this sounds like a great idea in theory, in practice these remotes are BEYOND frustrating. The reason is that there are too many buttons, and pressing the wrong button at the wrong time will make the presentation quit working. And no matter how carefully we instruct the presenter to recover from such incidents, ("If everything stops working press this button labeled Magic Fix-It Button!") ostensibly they will forget. Every. Single. Time. These buttons, they must be disabled. We wanted to solve two problems. The first was the button designed to switch applications. It's an excellent idea, but for some reason it doesn't work properly. You can switch out of your presentation, but you can't switch back. The second was the button that suddenly blanks the screen. We are told that this button is coronary-inducing. We wrote the following script using the excellent and free AutoHotkey program. It works like a charm, in both PowerPoint and OpenOffice.org Impress. If you don't have AutoHotkey, we used its compiler to make an EXE file. You may simply download the file to disable Targus PowerPoint Remote buttons.  
; Disable Targus Remote Buttons - by Mango - http://www.toao.net/
#SingleInstance force

; First, disable Alt+Shift+Tab.
!+Tab::Return

; Next, disable Shift+Alt, a byproduct of disabling Alt+Shift+Tab.
+Alt::

; If a window is active named "PowerPoint Slide Show", disable the 'b' key as it will blank the screen.
#IfWinActive, PowerPoint Slide Show
 {
 b::Return
 }

; Disable the 'b' key in OpenOffice.org Impress.
#IfWinActive, ahk_class SALTMPSUBFRAME
 {
 b::Return
 }
Name: Email: (Required only if you want a reply.) Comment: