How to disable the touchpad on a laptop
The touchpad was invented back in the 20th century by George Gerfeide, but this innovation was not immediately applied. Only six years later the touchpad became famous in the world of computer technology. And Apple is the first company to use it in the manufacture of the PowerBook laptop.
The touchpad is convenient to use to view information in your browser, open a document for reading or play a simple toy, but for more complex actions you should use the mouse and turn off the touch device. Touch panel manufacturers develop software for the touchpad so that the user can configure it, turn it on or off. The most famous and widespread manufacturers are: Synaptics, Elantech Devices Corporation, Alps Electric Corporation.
There are several ways to disable the touchpad
The first method
The most savvy will certainly look for a special keyboard hotkey, which would involve disabling the touchpad. It looks like a crossed out square or a square with an index finger and is located in close proximity to the touchpad, but the presence of such a button is rather an exception to the rule than a pattern. Therefore, it is worth considering other options for disabling the touchpad.
The second method is standard
All laptops have a function key "Fn". This, in combination with others from the “F1-F12” series, should disable the touchpad, but this combination varies depending on the brand of laptop.
Let's look at typical key combinations for disabling the touchpad for various laptop manufacturers:
1. Dell – “Fn+F5”.
2. ASUS - “Fn+F9”, “Fn+F7”.
3. Acer - “Fn+F7”.
4. Lenovo - “Fn+F8”, “Fn+F5”.
5. HP - double tap the touchpad in the upper left corner or hold the touch in this place for five seconds.
6. Sony Vaio - “Fn+F1”.
7. Samsung - “Fn+F5”.
These keyboard shortcuts will only work if all original drivers and utilities are installed on the device.
The third method is universal
The simplest and probably most convenient way to disable the touchpad is to automatically turn off the mouse when you plug it into the USB connector.
To configure you will need to do the following:
- Go to “Start”, select “Control Panel”, find “Mouse” and select “Device Settings”.
- Then go to the “Touchpad Enable/Disable” tab and set the switch to “Disable”.
You can also use another method
Go to “My Computer”, select “Manage”, find “Device Manager” and in “Mice and other pointing devices” set the switch to “Disconnect device”.
The fourth method is software
For those who use a Synaptics touchpad, the method to disable it in the Synaptics Pointing Device Driver is suitable. Thus, you can not only disable the touchpad, but also adjust the sensitivity of the device.
If you need to disable the touchpad while working with text, you should use the Touchfreeze utility.
In addition, the user can use it to assign goryachie key, which will be responsible for turning the touchpad on and off while typing.
Please note that it is not compatible with Windows 7.
Fifth way
For those who are interested in disabling the touchpad for a long time, you need to resort to setting it up in Bios.
For this it is necessary go to Bios, go to the “Advanced” tab and select the appropriate touchpad value in the “Internal Pointing Device” section. It should be noted that the laptop comes with instructions, where you can study in detail how all its components work. If suddenly in the article you did not find a suitable way to disable the touchpad, then you should turn to the materials that came with the laptop.
