Disable touch screen with keyboard input only

Question

I am trying to disable the touch screen on my laptop because it is broken. There is a crack in the glass over top of the screen which is causing Windows to think there are random taps occurring continuously all over the place. Otherwise the laptop is perfectly usable as long as I turn off the touch screen (which I never use anyway).

I have searched for how to turn off the touch screen, but they all rely on opening Device Manager, selecting a device, etc., but none of these work for me because the random input is causing windows to close and/or the mouse to jump around and/or random taps on the wrong items.

I was able to do this several months ago, but it took about a half hour and some good luck to get it done. Since then the crack and the random input has gotten worse. I updated to Windows 8.1 and that turned the touch screen back on, and unless I can turn it off again then the laptop is useless as a Windows machine.

Is there any way to access Device Manager settings with the keyboard only, perhaps before Windows boots up and starts acting on input from the touch screen?

Answer 1

Hold one finger on the screen while you use your mouse to navigate.

Answer 2

You can disable the touchscreen with PowerShell. Here is some code that works on Windows 10. For earlier operating systems there is equivalent functionality using WMI.

Here is the code. First we find "touch" devices, searching by friendlyname.

There is code to disable and re-enable.

# Get 'Plug & Play' (PNP) devices by name
$devices = Get-PnpDevice  | where friendlyname -like "*touch*" 

# Disable devices
$devices | Disable-PnpDevice -Confirm:$false
# Enable devices
$devices | Enable-PnpDevice -Confirm:$false