Anyone, who has used a touchpad as well as an external USB mouse would definitely prefer the latter one because a normal computer mouse is easy to grip and recommended for quick operation. If you work for long hours with your laptop, it’s certainly not recommended to work with the touchpad because this may induce finger strain. Touchpads are great when you are away from your desk but can come in the way of efficiency if not managed well. One of the problems with laptop touchpads is the frequent typing errors encountered when your fingers accidentally slip in the touchpad area. Suddenly, the cursor is misplaced to some other place and you find that the paragraph written a few minutes ago is disturbed by misspelled words or characters. This is very annoying and in this article I am going to describe how writers can manage their laptop’s touchpad for better productivity.
Disable the Touchpad using the Function Key
The easiest way to toggle the activity of your laptop’s touchpad is to use the correct combination of function key and the assigned key between F1-F12. Different laptops have different keyboard shortcuts assigned, you have to check with the vendor’s website to know the correct combination which disables the laptop’s touchpad momentarily.
On my Leonovo ideapad, the keyboard shortcut for disabling the touchpad is Fn + F8. Whenever I am writing an article or preparing a document, I always turn off the touchpad to avoid typing errors.
Disable The Touchpad from Control Panel
Another way to disable the touchpad is from Windows control panel. If you have installed the proper drivers (synaptic pointing device) for the touchpad, you will see an entry listed in the control panel. To do this, open Control panel and click the “Mouse” link. Then select the “Device settings” tab and click the “disable” button as shown below:
Disable The Touchpad Completely From the BIOS
If you want to completely get rid of the touchpad annoyance and do not want to use any tool or other windows tweaks, the best option would be to disable it from the BIOS. To do that, restart your computer and hold the F8 key (the keyboard shortcut to enter the BIOS varies from laptop to laptop).
You will enter the BIOS settings, now find the setting for disabling laptop’s touchpad – this path varies for different laptops.
Use Touchpadpal to Automatically Disable Touchpad when you are typing
If you do not know the correct keyboard combination to disable the touchpad and neither you want to tinker with the control panel settings, try using Touchpadpal. It’s a free little utility for Windows, which disables the touchpad whenever you hit any keyboard key. That means, whenever you are typing something, the mousepad is automatically disabled and it’s enabled again when you stop typing. Nice !
There are no settings to configure and no options to tweak, the only annoyance is that you have to run the program every time you start windows. But you can tweak Windows startup items from “Run -> Msconfig -> Startup” and add the program manually so that Touchpadpal runs in the background whenever you restart Windows. If you are an Ubuntu user, please check out our earlier article on how to disable synaptics touchpad on Ubuntu. Image credit: Web Developers Notes
