How to disable touchpad on Windows 7?

Question

How can I disable the touchpad completely on Windows 7?

I have an Acer Aspire 5738Z. The reason that I want to disable the touchpad is that it at times decides to go haywire, clicking all over the screen and zooming. This is undesired behaviour, and since I use a USB-connected anyway, I'd be fine with not being able to use the touchpad.

Answer 1

This is generally not software related, but hardware related.

You can disable the touch-pad with a special button, you can find which in the manual.
You can find the manual for this model [Acer Aspire 5738Z]: here.
According to this, that button should be right next to the pad.

Whether a software solution exist depends on the drivers of the device, some drivers (and their software) allows disabling the pad from the software itself, some drivers have the option for the pad to be disabled when an external device is plugged etc'.

Answer 2

I haven't actually seen that exact model, but it's probably a marked Fn-F key combination built into the keyboard.

For Acers it's often Fn+F6 to toggle it on and off.

Answer 3

If all else fails you can disable it in the device manager.

Answer 4

This would kind of be a hack and obviously isn't a great solution, but I suppose you could disable or uninstall the driver for your touchpad. You'd need to find the touchpad under Control Panel-->Hardware and Sound-->Device Manager-->Mice and other pointing devices, then double click it to open the properties dialog. Under the Driver tab, there are buttons to disable and uninstall the driver. For me, the disable button is grayed out, so uninstalling the driver might be the only available option.

If you happen to have a Lenovo laptop with the UltraNav software installed, you can disable the touch pad by unchecking a checkbox in Control Panel-->Hardware and Sound-->Mouse-->UltraNav tab.