There seems to be a conspiracy to keep me from posting. My DSL connection has died again, and now the modem in my firewall machine that I was using for backup seems to have gone to that Happy Hardware Hunting Ground as well.

I'm reduced to posting from my laptop, which I hate, because I dislike the keyboard intensely. Does anyone know if there's any way to disable the touchpad, other than taping a piece of paper over it?

Erm.. uninstall the touchpad driver? Does it have one, or is it so integrated with the hardware that it doesn't need one?

The touchpad on my wife's laptop is disabled by the simple expedient of attaching a mouse.

I don't know if it has a touchpad driver. It's a fairly new machine (about two years old). It doesn't disable when the mouse is attached, but I sure wish it did.

I don't understand why they didn't make it simple to kill it--having it enabled makes it very difficult to type, because my thumbs are always brushing the stupid thing and joggling the cursor around.

There is often a BIOS setting to determine if the auto-disable is active or not.

By definition the touchpad is device that requires a driver. It could be built directly onto the north bridge of the chipset and would none the less be seen by Windows as a distinct entity. It isn't necessary to uninstall. Just go into its properties in Device Manager (assuming Windows) and check off the box labeled for that purpose. This will relegate the touchpad to inactive status until you undo the entry. Be sure to do that before you take the laptop somewhere without a mouse or you'll be relearning how to control Windows solely from the keyboard.

I hate the touchpad too. Best thing to do is plug in a PS/2 mouse. That will automatically disable the touchpad.

Not on mine. Touchpad remains enabled with mouse plugged in.

Just to check: Rand, are you plugging the mouse into the PS/2 port? Or is it a serial or USB mouse? My HP laptop has a hardware-level override that disables the touchpad only if a PS/2 mouse is attached. Attaching a USB mouse leaves the touchpad active.

There's also a button that will disable the touchpad, but then if you don't have an external mouse you have no pointing device at all. And trying to operate Windows without a mouse always makes me think I've sidestepped into one of Purgatory's medium-nasty levels of punishment.

It's a PS-2 mouse, and it's plugged into the PS-2 port. And doing so has no effect on the touchpad (though it seems to me that it should).