One of the best ways to improve security when you’re online is to use Windows’ onscreen keyboard to enter details into banking and other financial websites.  It might be slower than using a traditional keyboard but it’s far more effective at protecting what you type as keyloggers and other malware that might be present on your PC can’t detect your keypresses as easily.

Unless you have a tablet computer though you’re restricted to pinning the onscreen keyboard to your Windows 7 taskbar.  This is fine, but it lacks the cool features that come with tablets such as spell-checking, word prediction and having a pop out keyboard available on your screen all of the time.

It is possible to get these features though even if you don’t have a tablet computer or a touchscreen, and here I’ll talk you through how to add these features to your Windows 7 desktop.

The first step is to type the word services into the search box in the Windows 7 Start Menu and run the Services program that appears.  You need the specific tablet PC functionality running to access these features, and they’re disabled by default if Windows doesn’t detect a touch screen on your computer.

With the Services panel open you need to find the Tablet PC Input Service.  Right click on this service and select it’s Properties from the context menu that appears.

Now a new panel will appear with the properties for the Service.  The next job is to change its startup type to either Automatic where it will start every time Windows 7 boots up, or Manual where it will start whenever you call it.

Finally we need to go back into the Start Menu and type the word tablet pc into the search box.  When the Tablet PC Input Panel appears in the search results, click on it to run it.

There’s just one more step now and that is to activate the two ways to easily access the on-screen keyboard.  In these options you can either turn on the option to Show the icon on the taskbar (this will be essential if you have set the service to start manually), activate the option to Use the Input Panel tab or, as I have done here, tick both options.  If you want to use the input panel tab you will also want to Show [the] Input Panel sliding open from the tab which you can set for either the left or the right of your screen.

Note here that if clicking this brings up the actual keyboard rather than the options for you, clicking the Tools button on the keyboard will display the options link.

With this done you will now have quick and easy access to the in-screen keyboard in Windows.  You’ll see in the image below that we now have an icon on the Windows 7 taskbar for activating the on-screen keyboard and that the keyboard itself is also docked at the side of the screen for when you need it.

This docked keyboard can be dragged around and put wherever you want it to be.

The on-screen keyboard in Windows really is a way to make your online banking and finance much more secure.  This is a very small change to Windows but one that, I’m sure you’ll agree, will be well worth doing for a great many people.