Can't disable touchpad(corrupt/missing drivers?)  

I'm not sure if this 100% belongs here but I just recently have been having a problem with completely disabling my Dell touchpad.

Today I woke my laptop out of sleep mode and it failed to start get past the Starting Windows animation so I restarted it. Everything was fine, but my touchpad is not disabled like it's been for months. So I tried going into the mouse settings and disable it through the touchpad tab. Well, I don't see that tab anymore.


After that I read online that if you don't see the tab anymore that means the driver isn't installed..I did have the driver for it but then I decided to uninstall it through device manager to see if it might reinstall itself and fix the problem. Before that, I did try to update the driver but it said it was up to date and working. After restarting it did say it was installing some drivers...but still no sign of the touchpad settings. Now when I go back to mouse or device manager, where it used to list the touchpad that's been replaced with another HID compliant mouse.

The other thing I tried but discovered that wasn't such a good idea, was I found my touchpad drivers on Dell's site for the right model and tried installing it, upon installation it said that the same drivers existed and asked if I still wanted to install them, and I did just that. Wound up having to do a system restore to remove the files for the computer to boot up again.

I might try and do another system restore but I'm not sure if that'll fix the problem. Is there a way to fully uninstall all traces of the touchpad so I can cleanly reinstall it?

I have an Acer Aspire and no idea what usb mouse I'm using but by download synaptic driver I was
able to get the tab in Mouse Properties of Device settings next to hardware tab and disabled pad
from there. I hate touch pads of any sort. Give me wireless mouse any day. Too easy to hit the pad
while typing if activated and screw a whole paragraph up.
Good luck.

It's a Dell, Dude! What'd you expect it to be easy? Unfortunately Dell has gone the way of Comtrash
and Packard Hell. You get used to it.