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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.

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Touchpads are hardware and are not fully/universally controlled in the same way by Windows. We'll need more information on the computer type/make/model, and what exactly you want to accomplish before we can help. – techie007 Jun 7 '11 at 21:03
@techie: I've added some info, is there anything more? – user67194 Jun 7 '11 at 21:09
Techie has a good pointer there as a lot of vendors install their own software to manage the device, simply disabling it via that or devmgmt.msc will work or a function key as well if available. – Ben Lavender Mar 18 at 22:59

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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'.

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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.

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

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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.

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Uninstalling would cause windows to reinstall it on reboot. – kinokijuf Dec 21 '11 at 18:41
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Anyone having a problem disabling/enabling the touchpad go here. http://windows7themes.net/how-to-disable-touchpad-in-windows-7.html . Download the driver program for your operating system. You will have to restart after install. When log back on a box will appear. It is the actual mouse settings dialog box with a new tab on it. Select disable (goes directly to this when box appears). It will say you are about to disable the only active pointing device, are you sure you want to disable? Select yes/ok/close. Your touchpad will be disabled. Maker sure you have an external or you will not be able to reverse if you wish. Good luck.

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Do you have any affiliation with this software? – ChrisF Mar 18 at 23:14

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