How disable Dell XPS Vista laptop touchpad??

How disable Dell XPS Vista laptop touchpad??



I have looked everywhere and am pretty good at finding answers. However with my new Dell XPS 1530 laptop there is no selection in the BIOS, Services, Device Manager, Control Panel to disable the built-in touchpad.



I am using an external wireless USB mouse and the touchpad is still active.



If you uninstall the driver, it will reinstall itself.



I would be happy to live with an error by perhaps renaming the driver file for the touchpad driver if it would indeed disable it.



I even put a piece of cardboard and a credit card (as a test) on the touchpad. It can still interpret your movement thought it. Perhaps I need a piece of foam or something strange.



Why do I want to disable it? Because like others, if you are not careful when you type, you can hit the touchpad and it will completely mess up your typing by relocating the mouse.



Thanks much

Peter

 

You should have something similar to this. Open up your Mouse Control Panel and click on the tab that says trackpad. See image here:

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7168/capturena4.jpg

Not sure if the 1530 has the synaptics or the alps... but if its the alps, the most recent driver is here:

http://ftp.us.dell.com/input/R176423.EXE

 

I actually can't find how to do this either. Are you just going start -> control panel -> mouse? I get a completely different screen and can't find how to disable the touchpad with a mouse installed either.

 

Actually what I had to do was make sure that the APOINT driver was being run at boot up. To do this you simply go to Start, Run and type in MSCONFIG and hit enter.

Then click on selective startup or something like that. Make sure there is a checkmark in the box for APOINT to run. Then reboot.

If that does not work you can reinstall the touchpad drivers from the Dell website. I had to do that. When installing, it told me that I was installing an older version. That is fine as there was only one version out there for the Dell 1530.

Then reboot and you should see the icon in the system tray. I then clicked on it and checked the box that said to disable the touchpad if another mouse is found.

Peter