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General discussion

Disabling touchpad when mouse is plugged in?

Apr 6, 2005 2:04AM PDT

This is sort of a generic laptop question.

Is there a way to have your laptop automatically disable the touchpad whenever a mouse is plugged in?

I always use external mice, and my hand tends toaccidentally hit the touchpad annoyingly moving the cursor and messing up my typing or moving things around. It would be nice if it would automatically shutdown if the computer detected an external input device, you know?

If you can't do this natively within windows, does anyone know of any third-party utlities/hacks that would make this possible?

Discussion is locked

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Disabling touchpad when mouse is plugged in?
Apr 8, 2005 6:26AM PDT

Have the same problem... I taped a small piece of thin card stock across the pad using double stick tape on the perimeter adjacent to the pad (don't tape directly to the pad itself). Works fine and is easily removed.

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hack the mouse reg key...
Apr 8, 2005 7:10AM PDT

thats a good idea, however that makes a nice laptop look cheap. There is a registry setting burried somewhere that handles how the mouse is assigned its resources. If you find the mouse reg key you can tamper (safely) by disabling its allotted resourses. Sounds harder than it is, but locating the right key is the only hard part. You could also try (at your own risk of course) going through device manager and right click on the touchpad mouse device and check 'disable'. Between these two ideas, you should be successful. Depending on the type of laptop you have you may RISK disabling your external mouse IF the mouse resource(s) are 'shared' or share the same port(?)

still worth a try...

g'luck

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Disabling touchpad when mouse plugged in
Apr 9, 2005 11:15PM PDT

Ihad the same problem and so annoying it was. I have disabled the touchpad by using Fn and F9 on my laptop which is easily reversed should you have a mouse problem as you will still be able to access the touchpad when you need it. There should be a similar function on yourlaptop somewhere.Hope this helps,Alice

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Try BIOS set-up
Apr 10, 2005 3:28PM PDT

On my aging Inspiron 4100 this option is available in the BIOS set-up. You can choose to disable touchpad automatically when external PS/2 mouse plugged in. Check to see if your bios offers this...

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Disabling touchpad
Apr 13, 2005 8:39AM PDT

In device management I have 1 HID compatible mouce with I use. And beeing desturbed of the touhpad that olways is in the way.
I looked in te "device manager" and so that there was a PC/2 for a mouse. I unaktivated that and vips the touchpad died. So now I use the USB mouse and the touchpad is dead.
Hope you can do the same.
I have a Compag Presario