How to disable touchpad

Here's the problem. The Dell Latitude of a friend of mine has a problem. When she installed the wireless mouse, the icon for the synaptic touch pad disappeared from the system tray. That icon was the only way to disable the touchpad. We can't find out how to open the program to disable the touchpad. We have gone to programs and clicked on everything in the Synaptics folder, but none will open the program to disable the touchpad.

The touchpad still works and the software appears in the program files section of explore ... but there is no application in the start menu program files.

So we went to device manager and can't find the driver listed anywhere. We would have disabled the driver, but can't do
that.

Any one have any ideas?

Thanks

 

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the touchpad program(driver software)? May put the icon back in the system tray.

Matt

 

My daughter has a dell laptop and it seems to me that I saw an entry for the touchpad in msconfig. Don't recall what it was called. If no joy there take a look in the control panel and see if there's something in there for it.

 

Matt: I think the touchpad software is on the system software disk. I'm afraid to uninstall it for fear that I'll have to reinstall the whole system.

I have looked and looked at control panel to no avail. It isn't there.

I can't understand why the synapsis touch pad software won't open since it still appears to be in "programs" but with no .exe file. I've clicked on everything and it doesn't open.

I can't find any identification of what version, etc it is ... but doesn't it have to have a driver to work? Where would the driver be located? Wouldn't it be in Device Manager? It's nowhere to be found. I guess I'll try the Dell Knowledge base but that is such a mess I'll never find it. I thought I would try here first.

Right now my friend has solved the problem by taping a business card over the touchpad. She wants to be sure she has it in case the mouse fails and she needs to access the computer.

Thanks

 

You can download drivers for it from dell. I couldn't put a link here for the exact driver as I didn't know which latitude it is or which OS. You can start here . After you select the model, on the next page select input devices and the OS and it should get you there. Did you look in msconfig for it?

 

Does anyone know how to find the missing taskbar icon?

 

Okay ... The Dell bb for the Latitude solved the problem.
Dell has a setting in the bios for touchpad-ps2 mouse that can be changed to ps2 mouse only or serial mouse. For the Logictech
wireless mouse, plugged into the usb port, serial mouse was the setting. It disabled the touchpad using only the mouse as a pointing device. This works perfectly as the bios can always enable the touchpad if needed.

Thanks ... you solved my problem again.

 

Glad you figured it out, though I'm not really sure we helped. If by bb you meant bulletin board seems to me you solved it yourself.