It’s a common keyboard annoyance: you’ve pressed the Caps Lock key, either not realised or just forgotten about it, and then typed a whole line of text IN THE WRONG CASE – or maybe wondered why a website password hasn’t been recognised – before you’ve noticed. Sounds familiar? Then you might be interested in CapsUnlocker, a new tool which can help in a variety of ways.

At its simplest you can use the program as a Caps Lock status indicator, handy if you don’t have one already. (It’s surprisingly configurable, too – you can choose the icon to display when the key is on or off.)

You might disable Caps Lock entirely by choosing the relevant right-click option from CapsUnlocker’s system tray icon.

It's only a 97KB download, but CapsUnlocker provides a surprising number of options

But if that’s a little too absolute then you can have the program automatically turn Caps Lock off after a defined period of keyboard activity (30 seconds by default, though you can change it to whatever you like). So if you turn Caps Lock on, then leave the keyboard idle for a while, the program will automatically turn it off for you: very easy.

There is one small problem with CapsUnlocker. It looks like the program is portable – there’s one executable and DLL, no installation is required – but it saves its settings to the Registry rather than an INI file, and provides no way of cleaning these up. (You can of course do this manually from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ITSamples.)

That aside, though, CapsUnlocker is a small and efficient tool (97KB download, 1.9MB RAM used) which does provide several ways to help you take control of your Caps Lock key, and if that’s a familiar problem then you should definitely give it a try.