Way to disable touchscreen/keyboard while still showing display?

[KrazyHorse]

windows 8 laptop - I want to be able to let my kid watch stuff without him having the ability to do anything terrible (or stop the videos) with random key clicking

[DaShi]

Handcuffs?

[ZEE]

Wrong forum.

[loinburger]

You can use devcon to disable devices - see this tutorial. Create a batch file that disables the keyboard and touch screen and another batch file that enables them (or figure out how to write a batch file that toggles between the enabled/disabled states but that seems like more trouble than it's worth), and put a link it it on your desktop or whatever so you can activate it with your mouse.

I've got an Asus, and it automatically disables the touch pad if an external mouse is plugged in - your laptop manufacturer might have something similar, or there might be a general purpose program that disables the touch pad if an external mouse is plugged in (or you can disable the touch pad when you disable the touch screen / keyboard, though I'm not positive that this won't also disable the external mouse). Anyway, if you're successful at this, then get a wireless mouse that uses a dongle, then hide the mouse and leave the dongle in - unless your kid figures out to remove the dongle (not likely, mouse dongles are pretty small i.e. they're not likely to arouse attention) then this will effectively disable the touch pad as well.

[KrazyHorse]

Thanks loin, I'll check it out

[Dinner]

Though luck, kid.

[Dinner]

Loin, used evil third party software!

[loinburger]

Loin, used evil third party software!

DevCon is packaged with the Windows Driver Kit and the Windows SDK, which are released by Microsoft and are downloaded from microsoft.com. Whatever definition of "third party software" that you're using is horribly flawed.