Workaround
As you can see from the official Drivers and software page, there's nothing related to the keyboard. Apparently Windows can handle those media keys directly without any extra drivers. Since uninstalling some drivers is not an option, you could disable the mute/unmute key so that Windows should simply ignore it:
Open a command prompt as administrator.
Type the following command and press Enter:
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout" /v "Scancode Map" /t REG_BINARY /d 000000000000000002000000000020e000000000 /f
Log off or restart Windows to apply the changes.
If that doesn't work, it means your laptop keyboard doesn't use standard media key scancodes, and you'll have to resort to AutoHotKey or similar, as suggested by @DBZ_A.
A bit of explanation
Quoting Wikipedia:
A scancode (or scan code) is the data that most computer keyboards
send to a computer to report which keys have been pressed. A number,
or sequence of numbers, is assigned to each key on the keyboard.
Since Windows 2000, the Scancode Map
registry value can be used to remap a key to another or disable it entirely. The scan code mappings are stored in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout
In the Keyboard Layout
key, the Scancode Map
value must be added. This value is of type REG_BINARY
(little Endian format) and has the data format specified in the following table.
Start offset (in bytes) | Size (bytes) | Data
---------------------------------------------------------------------
0 | 4 | Header: Version Information
4 | 4 | Header: Flags
8 | 4 | Header: Number of Mappings
12 | 4 | Individual Mapping
... | ... | ...
Last 4 bytes | 4 | Null Terminator (0x00000000)
The first and second DWORDS
store header information and should be set to all zeroes for the current version of the Scan Code Mapper. The third DWORD
entry holds a count of the total number of mappings that follow, including the null terminating mapping. The minimum count would therefore be 1 (no mappings specified). The individual mappings follow the header. Each mapping is one DWORD
in length and is divided into two WORD
length fields. Each WORD
field stores the scan code for a key to be mapped.
Source: Keyboard and mouse class drivers
In this case there's only one mapping: the media mute key (scancode 0xe020
). It is remapped to 0x0000
, which means it gets disabled.
Scan code values can be easily found through programs like SharpKeys.
Further reading