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With your touchscreen or mouse, open Settings and go to Devices > Touchpad and make sure the toggle switch at the top is toggled On. If your laptop doesn't feature a touchscreen display, then you will need a mouse to revive a disabled touchpad. And if you'd like more tips, here's how to master Windows 10 using 11 hidden tricks. I'll start with how to revive a dead touchpad and then cover the various settings you can use to tweak its sensitivity, gestures and scrolling direction. Whether your touchpad is dead to the touch or is acting skittish - registering unintended gestures while failing to recognize your intended swipes, pinches, taps and clicks - Windows 10 ( $140 at Amazon) offers a host of settings to let you get working the way you want. You can extend the life of your laptop with a few, simple tweaks to its touchpad. Being able to turn the touchpad on and off with a simple key combination makes the problem bearable while we wait for a better solution.There are three things you can do to bring your touchpad back to life.ĭon't let a touchy touchpad ruin your opinion of a laptop that's otherwise in fine working order. Will disable the touchpad while xinput -set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Enabled" 1 xinput -set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Enabled" 0
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If all you want is to be able to quickly and easily disable the touchpad so you can type, then try setting up keyboard shortcuts as follows. It also tells you how to do the patch if you feel brave enough to patch your kernel. The protocol has been mostly reverse engineered and there is now a fix involving a patched kernel module, but it isn't completely perfect (won't do multitouch) and hasn't yet found its way into the mainstream kernels. The failure to recognise the touchpad and fallback to identifying it as a PS2 mouse is due to the hardware using a new protocol and the manufacturer not releasing the specs so that a free driver can be written.
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