Laptop users can be divided into two categories: those who prefer a mouse, and those who prefer a touchpad. Those who belong to the second group can immediately close this article - it is not for them. But mouse lovers should read it carefully. Surely more than once or twice everyone had to deal with an insignificant but annoying problem - when using a mouse there is always a chance to accidentally touch the touchpad and spoil something. Therefore, today we will talk about how to disable the touch panel on laptops. There are many ways, from the simplest to those that need to be considered. But for starters, a little digression into history.
Touchpad Facts
The touchpad was invented by George Herfide back in 1988. However, his device gained popularity only after six years. The first touchpad laptops were Apple's Powerbooks. It is worth remembering that on Apple laptops they are designated as trackpads, not touchpads.
Touch panels do not differ in the variety of shapes: they are either rectangular or round. This device, of course, is very convenient, but in some cases it can not be used. For example, in professional work with graphic editors.
And now let's move on to the question of how to set up a laptop so that the touchpad does not interfere with its easy use.
Elementary methods
For starters - the easiest. That does not require any special effort. Find an old plastic card, at least a bank card, at least a discount one - it doesn’t matter, and close the touch panel with it. For reliability, seal the whole thing with tape.
If the laptop is used only for working with text, then you need to do the following. Place the cursor on the text, and move the mouse to the lower right corner. Voila - the risk of spoiling something is reduced to 40%.
Lucky people should carefully inspect their touchpad on a laptop. There is a chance to find a small button in the corner of the panel. This button is responsible for the operation of the sensor. On different laptops, the design is different. Somewhere it's just a small square, and somewhere a pen touching the touchpad. When the button is pressed, the touch panel turns off.
Simple ways
At this point, it’s worth considering how to disable the
touchpad on laptops in
a more reliable way. You can make the touchpad automatically turn off when you connect a mouse to the laptop. To do this, go to the "Control Panel", find the "Mouse" tab there. Find “Device Settings” and set the slider to the “Disable” position in the “Enable / Disable Touch Panel” section. It is done.
In addition, there is an opportunity to simplify your task. Among the F1-F12 keys, there is one that is responsible for turning off the touch panel. Most likely, it will have a drawing of a crossed-out panel and an open mouse. The Fn key is easy to find. Pressing these two buttons simultaneously will stop the touchpad. Pressing the combination again will turn on the touch panel.
Difficult ways
These methods, perhaps, are not so much complicated to execute as they take a lot of time. The fastest of them is the use of software, the function of which is to make the touchpad on the laptop stop working. First of all, you should find out which company’s touchpad is installed. If Synaptics, then you can download the program Synaptics Pointing Device Driver. With this application, you can not only completely disable the touch panel, but also change its sensitivity. For everyone except WINDOWS 7 users, the Touchfreeze utility is available, which freezes the touchpad's response to typing.
If all this is too small, then you can solve the question of how to disable the touchpad on laptops, in a very radical way, which consists in changing the BIOS settings. In the Internal Pointing Device section, you will need to select the appropriate value for the touch panel. You can also try to disassemble the laptop and disconnect the cable connected to the touchpad.
Here are some basic ways to turn off the touchpad on laptops. One of them is for you. Even if you don’t know the features of your laptop and are not ready to disassemble it in detail, you can easily turn off the touch panel without spending extra nerves on this process. These methods will be useful to users of not only laptops, but also netbooks. There is no fundamental difference in disabling the touchpad on these devices.
Magic trackpad
We have already said that Apple uses a special authorial device as a touch panel. As a dessert, we will tell you more about it. The development is called Magic Trackpad, and it provides support for Multi-Touch technology. The device was first introduced in July 2010. This trackpad is similar to the one on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.
The trackpad is fully compatible with Mac OS X, starting with version 10.6.4. In addition, it can work in the environment of current Windows systems if they are run on Apple computers using BootCamp, if you add the driver for this device. The above blocking tools are also suitable for this device.