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Is there an easy way to disable this laptop's touchpad?

Is there an easy way to disable this laptop's touchpad?

Specifically, I'm on a Dell Inspiron 1525. I'd like to disable the touchpad so that I can re-enable if my mouse were to run out of batteries (so physically breaking the connection to the motherboard or uninstalling the driver will not be the best options). In the Control Panel, when I go to "Mouse" and find the touch pad, there is no disable option. Any ideas?

Asked by: Guest | Views: 273
Total answers/comments: 4
Guest [Entry]

"I finally got my Dell laptop track pad disabled.

I loaded Windows 7 64 bit onto a new 320 GB drive in my Dell Latitude D620 laptop, and I have been frustrated with the inability to disable the trackpad.

I tried looking it up 6 months ago and gave up, and I have been dealing with it ever since. The original drive had all of Dell drivers and stuff already installed on it. But Windows 7 doesn’t. So tonight I thought I’d give this another try and went to the BIOS and disabled it there, but it still continued to work.

I then went to Dell's website and downloaded the input device Alps Pointer for my laptop so that I could get the driver back into my laptop. I then installed the driver inspite of the fact that Windows said there is a known issue with this driver. I clicked on the lookup issue on the Internet but nothing happened. So I went ahead and installed it anyway.

After I installed it I went to the control panel, then clicked on Hardware and Sound, then clicked on the mouse tab and the interface for the track pad and pops right up under the device tab. Here you can enable or disable the pointing stick and the touch pad. It works great for me and my mouse is still functioning just fine.

Finally after 8 months I have fixed this issue and hopefully it will work for you."
Guest [Entry]

"You can install the Dell driver on Windows 7 using the compatibility mode.
I used the Vista Service Pack 2 mode, and it went just fine.
And the option to disable the touchpad works well."
Guest [Entry]

"Under Linux on my netbook I use syndaemon to disable the touchpad responding to clicks while I'm typing, which gives almost the best of both worlds.

http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/ seems to be a Windows implementation of the same idea, though I have not got around to trying it yet so can't comment on how well it works."
Guest [Entry]

"I found a great way:

Install the latest touchpad drivers from the Dell website.
Drag the mouse icon from your control panel onto your desktop.
Right click on the newly created shortcut and then click 'properties'.
Click on the 'short cut' tab.
In the shortcut key box press the letter m (without the commas) and then it should change to something like 'Ctrl + Alt + M'.
Now whenever you would like to disable the touchpad just click on 'Ctrl + Alt + M'.
The mouse properties will appear.
Under the 'device settings tab' you can disable the touchpad.
Use the same key press to reenable the touchpad."