Windows 7 - Dell touchpad set to click after every tap, hard to type with it there

Hello everyone. Apologies if the title wasn't clear.

I bought a dell inspiron laptop recently and was having some trouble when I type. My hands tend to rest at times on the touchpad and every time i do, the single click tap takes me to where ever the mouse is located. Usually its in another section of the document that I am writing in, so that I start to type in the middle of a paragraph that I had already written.

In addition, I have installed asenother mou <-- see??? it did it again!

"In addition, I have installed another mouse driver for a mouse to use with the laptop, so I haven't been able to access any mouse settings other than the additional mouse settings. However, the touchpad still functions."

Is there a way to either disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected, or to change its settings while another mouse is connected?

I am afraid that if I uninstall the mouse driver and see about changing the touchpad settings (if possible), that installing the new mouse again would just take away any of those settings that I would change.

All suggestions welcome. If nothing is forthcoming I will attempt to uninstall the mouse driver and change the touchpad settings. I would prefer not to have to manually disable the touchpad

Thanks in advance!

If you're sure your touchpad options don't include a 'disable when typing for X seconds' then a simple utility like this one should help out...

Not sure what the controller is for your touchpad is.
Mine is Synaptics.

I had the same problem as you. A touchpad on a laptop is not my friend at all. My hand rests on one half of it when typing usually.

I use a Logitech USB wireless mouse, and have this option in the mouse properties. I would imagine you may have something along the lines of this somewhere.

EDIT: I did notice that, on my moms netbook, there is no option to disable the touchpad. She also uses a wireless mouse, and it's a Synaptics touchpad, but it doesn't have an option to disable it when an external pointing device is detected.

This is mine

Disable the touchpad and use a wireless mouse instead.

Disabling or Enabling the Touchpad Using the Hot Key | Dell

Which model is your Dell?

Also, if your Dell has an F key that has this on it, it toggles the touchpad on and off. It may be F6,F3, or right next to the F12 key.

It is an M5040 Inspiron

Andrew, that would be awesome, and I have the key, but it isn't working and I'm not sure why. Dell had all drivers preinstalled, and there are no drivers for this laptop model on their website. I could check the CD and see about that driver. But there are no markings to indicate that the driver isn't installed. I would imagine there to be 2 mouse drivers (touchpad and normal). It lists them both in device manager, and attempting to update the touchpad online brings up nothing. The key didn't even work before I installed the new mouse driver. But interestingly, the volume keys work... I may have to fiddle around and see whats up here.

I have a microsoft wireless mobile 3500 mouse and this is what the intrface looks like:

Qdos, I would prefer not to install anything more, but for sure I will use something like that provided everything else falls through.

Thank you everyone for your replies so far

Guessing Fn+F3 does nothing either,eh?
Hmmm..this is odd...it's almost as if the real deiver isn't installed, but then you would think it wouldn't work at all.

If your touchpad is Synaptics there will be a Synaptics icon in your tray.

Right click on that and uncheck: "Tap to click".

No, it doesn't. Perhaps it will when they start updating the laptop's drivers on the dell website. I think it is a newer laptop model.

TVeblen, this is what my driver looks like:


Additionally, I found this:


It wouldn't let me turn it "on", but it still works. I am almost sure that my own tampering in Ccleaner was the cause of this. The dell CD is confusing, but I'll see if I can't reinstall the driver from it, as Dell has yet to list the drivers on its website.

I did use Ccleaner in an attempt to get rid of all the extra Dell bloatware