OT: How to disable touchpad on laptop with Vista?

[David in Normandy]

Sorry for being so off-topic, I'm having a day off from DIY and renovating the house and trying to sort out my new Vista laptop. Nightmare! I know there are lots of IT literate people here who are often helpful with computer problems.

Does anyone know how to disable the touchpad on a laptop in Vista? I always use an USB mouse and the touchpad is driving me insane. I keep touching it accidentally with my palm while typing and it make the cursor jump elsewhere, wrecking documents and online forms.

My old XP laptop had a button above the touchpad to turn it off, but not the new laptop (slight oversight while buying). I?ve googled lots of pages and it seems there are thousands of people with the same problem. Some are lucky in pressing Function F7 or F9 will toggle it, but this does not work on mine.

Similarly it is not possible to disable the touchpad (shows as PS/2 compatible mouse) on device settings because disable is annoyingly greyed out in Vista! If I uninstall the device it automatically reinstalls itself on next boot up. I also doesn?t show up in the BIOS settings so I can?t disable it there either.

The most ridiculous suggestion I?ve found is also the one I?m likely facing ? stick three layers of duck tape over the touchpad!!! Brilliant bodge for a brand new Vista computer! The laptop is an Advent 9617 if that makes any difference.

As a side comment I just want to say that compared to XP, Vista absolutely stinks. Too much is either disabled or information unavailable.

[The Wanderer]

I have a new Asus LT, and in the end it was quite easy to disable the touchpad. I just went to the mouse/touchpad utility in the control panel, and when I got down through enough layers, there was an option to disble the touchpad. I found it almost by chance, however. As I said, I had to make my way down through several layers to actually get to the option to diable. On mine, there was a tab at the extreme right with device specific settings or something like that and on mine there was a button to click which took me into the appropriate menu to turn it off.

Is there a manufacturer's support site? Have you asked the retailer for advice, or did you get it from a box-shifter?

Which version are you using? I've swapped to Home Premium from XP on both the laptop and desktop. Obviously there are differences and you do have a learning curve to go through, but I'm finding it OK. Both machine are dual core with *lots* of memory......

[David in Normandy]

I've cracked it!!! A bit more googling showed that others with the same problem downloaded a generic synaptics device driver to overwrite the "correct" one that came with the computer. The generic driver software added an extra tab to the mouse settings and included an option that you describe above to disable the touchpad. Ah Bliss - no touchpad!!!

[Steve Firth]

A hammer.

[Andy Hall]

You installed it using the wrong drive.

This video explains how to install Vista properly:

and this one shows how the claimed functionality of Vista is done properly: