‘Break’ Your Co-Workers’ Keyboards By Enabling Filter Keys On Their PCs

By turning on one feature that is on every Windows computers, you can make your workmates think there’s something wrong with their keyboards.

The Filter Keys feature is part of all Windows operating systems that makes the keyboard ignore brief or repeated keystrokes. It aims to make it easier for people with hand tremors to type but you can use it to make co-workers believe their keyboards are broken.

To do this on a Windows 10 PC, you can wait until one of your colleagues leave their desks. Some people are known to leave their computers unlocked if they’re just taking a quick break. Take this opportunity to do the following:

Go to Settings > Ease Of Access > Keyboard > Scroll down to Filter Keys and turn it on.

Another way to do it is look up “filter keys” on the search taskbar which will come back with a “Ignore brief or repeated keystrokes” result. Select that and it will take you to the right location in Settings to turn Filter Keys on.

If you’re in an office that is still using Windows 7, you can just hold down shift button for about eight seconds and the a prompt will come up asking if you want to turn on Filter Keys. Select ‘Yes’.

Be sure to close the Settings window so your workmate won’t suspect a thing.

Then just sit back and wait until they come back and pull their hairs out in frustration as they complain about their malfunctioning keyboard. Be warned that if people find out that it was you who did it, they might end up throwing their keyboards at you.

This post is part of our Evil Week series at Lifehacker, where we look at the dark side of getting things done. Sometimes evil is justified, and other times, knowing evil means knowing how to beat it. Want more? Check out our evil week tag page.


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