I recently got the new Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 here at work. It’s an absolutely great keyboard; every key is right where it’s supposed to be, it’s ergonomic, really quiet and has a limited but useful set of extra keys.

But one strange feature is the “zoom” key. It is located in the middle of the keyboard, extremely useful were it not for the fact that it zooms; it doesn’t scroll. And there is no way of changing it. It just zooms. So with this incredibly potentially useful feature, I can change the size of my Firefox browser text, which is something I typically do once in the lifetime of a Windows installation.

Fortunately, I found a way to hack the default behavior using this nifty web page. You simply edit the Program Files\Microsoft Intellitype Pro\commands.xml file, and look for instances of ZoomIn/ZoomOut, and change these to ScrollUp/ScrollDown. Typically, these rows start with C319 and C320, and should look like this now (brackets not included because WordPress won’t let me type them in):

C319 Type=”6″ Activator=”ScrollUp”
C320 Type=”6″ Activator=”ScrollDown”

Then you restart the Type32.exe process (or restart the computer), and you’ve got scroll instead of zoom.

Back in the old days, you’d have to edit registry values or patch the binaries. Nice of Microsoft to include an xml file this time. Kudos to MS!