Can I disable the touchpad on my laptop?

bonzer

Hi,

Does your touchpad do a left click when you tap anywhere on the pad? Is the problem you end up clicking accidentally by touching the pad while typing hence respositioning the cursor where you don't want it?

I had this problem on my touchpad. I found the cursor moving while typing wasn't a problem as long as the pad didn't do a click. A large proportion of touchpads are made by Synaptics so it's likely your Dell has one. They do a great driver which has a huge range of options. One of the options is to switch off the click action so the touchpad only moves the cursor and doesn't actually do a click.

You can download the driver from:

http://www.synaptics.com/support/drive.cfm

There is only one driver for all Synapics made touchpads. You just need to choose the version of Windows you have.

Regards

Bonzer.

skintchick

It's a USB mouse.

the problem is what I posted above that I found on help. BUt I don;t understand what it wants me to do. THink I;ll have to call tech support at Dell and get them to talk me through it.

Thanks for all your help.

ManAtHome

Alternative is to plug in a separate keyboard.

skintchick

I've considered it. But it starts to stop being a laptop then! Might have to do that for at home actually, as it is very infuriating when I'm working as I do a lot of typing.

albertross_2

You can usually disable it in the bios..

skintchick

skintchick wrote:

I searched help and got this:

PS/2 Wheel Mouse Jumps Around Screen on Laptops with Touchpads
View products that this article applies to.
Article ID : 282753
Last Review : January 15, 2006
Revision : 1.1
This article was previously published under Q282753
SYMPTOMS
If you have a laptop computer and you are using a PS/2 wheel mouse, you may encounter erratic behavior with the mouse, such as the cursor jumping all over the screen; however, the built-in touchpad may work fine.
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CAUSE
This problem occurs because wheel mouse devices may be incompatible with some laptops, unless the laptop has special hardware to handle them. The wheel mouse transmits in 4-byte packets, while the internal touch pad transmits in 3-byte sequences. PS/2 devices are designed in such a way that the operating system may not be aware of an additional pointing device, nor of what the packet boundaries are between the different devices.

If the operating system interprets the packet alignment incorrectly, it may misinterpret data, thus causing erratic movements and clicks.
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RESOLUTION
To work around this problem, create a hardware profile in which the mouse is enabled and the touchpad is disabled.


But the help for the hardware profile has confused me and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. It talks about indokcing and dial in dial out stuff which doesn;t sound right. Help!

It's definitely that ^ but I don't know what it wants me to do! I don't understand teh hardware profile stuff I'm supposed to do

albertross_2

If it is caused by accidental touching, have a look in the bios, or you could stick a bit of sticky backed plastic over it.

Dell's also suffer from erratic mouse movement on their own sometimes, and this is usually cured by reseating the connector on the motherboard, or pressing down with the palm of your hand all over the keyboard (to reseat it).

Kilty_2

My Synaptics drivers ( Dell Inspiron 1300 ) has an option for "Disable touchpad when a USB pointing device is inserted"

skintchick

Where? Tell me, tell me! lol