NVidia GeForce In-Game Overlay Kills Custom Shortcut Keys

Just got a new, and very awesome, G5 and set up all my favorite shortcuts with keyboard shortcuts. (ctr+alt+W for Word for example). However, none of my shortcut shortcut keys worked. This drove me insane because it has become habit to hit them but then nothing would happen. Searched all over and almost all suggestions ended up with the dreaded total reinstall of Windows 10 as the final solution. Did not want to go there.

Instead, I fooled around with various programs looking for a possible culprit. Launched NVIDIA GeForce Experience and went to settings. Saw the setting for "In-Game Overlay" where you can hit Alt-Z to bring up all kinds of stuff like screen grab etc. Set it to OFF and PRESTO all my shortcut shortcuts started to work:-) Turned it back on and my shortcut shortcuts stopped working again so it’s a reproducible error/bug/feature. I guess while the GeForce program is always scanning for an Alt-Z it must be interfering with other shortcuts.

At any rate, I am so happy that I figured this out that I thought I would post here to perhaps save someone from doing all kinds of things to fix their shortcuts to no avail. (Reinstall keyboard drivers, change language, uninstall virus software, etc., etc. up to and including a complete reinstall).

Bottom line, Nvidia needs to fix it so the “in-game overlay” does not kill Windows shortcut shortcut keys!

Matt C

Oh, absolutely love my G5 which I call “Blue Monster”