BabySmash! And defining what the power button does…

My son Koah loves to sit on my lap while I am working on my computer.  Usually he is fine to sit and watch the screens change, windows popping up and down, browsers loading, as I did my development work.  But over the past couple of weeks he has gotten much more aggressive and even having some family videos playing on the second monitor would not placate him… he just wants to bang on the keyboard. 

So this is where I pulled out my old Dell 8200 laptop and installed Scott Hanselman’s BabySmash.  BabySmash is an application written by Scott Hanselman that

will lock out the Windows Key, as well as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab so your baby can't get out of the application. As babies smash on the keyboard, colored shapes, letters and numbers appear on the screen.

Koah loved it and had a blast as the letters and shapes appeared and disappeared as he banged on the keyboard.  But Koah being a curious baby, quickly found the power button on the laptop and pressed it.  The laptop shut down, no more BabySmash.

I had forgotten to disable the power button action that shuts down the computer when it is pressed.  You can do this on Windows Vista under Control Panel > Power Options > Choose what the power button does.  Just change the default setting of “Shut down” to “Do nothing”.

Of coarse he can still hold the power button down for 5 seconds and the entire machine will shut off... hopefully he will not be able to figure that out.