To each his own, I guess; I use touchpads a lot and I’m quite comfortable with them - even for click-dragging and drag-selecting and stuff; I have a sub-notebook thinkpad that I used for my bird box webcam - it has a tit and I hated it - always seemed to be overshooting the target.
I’m pretty good with it, in fact I can even do emergency photoshop work on it. The touchpad, wouldn’t even bother firing up PS if all I had was a touchpad.
I’m pretty sure it works by capacitive sensing, same as the iPod click wheel.
On my Dell (an Inspiron 5100), under the Control Panel > Mouse there is a tab for ‘devise settings’. Under that tab, there is an option for the settings for each pointing devise (on mine, it’s the Synaptics touchpad). Within that dialog box there is a way to either disable it, or reduce the palm sensitivity.
You should be able to find a sensitivity setting, sometime it’s called PalmCheck, in the mouse properties applet that you can adjust (it’s sort of hidden sometimes). Adjusting it a notch or two should get rid of the accidental bumping problem. I’ve found the setting on Dell, Gateway, and Toshiba notebooks.
But there is a little app called the Virtual TouchPad cover that you may want to try … I’ve never used it, so I don’t know if it’s buggy though.
when i got the laptop it had xp professional on it (and other stuff) since i had a copy of the home edition handy, i formated c and installed the home edition. i think this is the reason that when i go into control panel there doesn’t seem to be an option to either change the sensitivity or turn off the mouse.
Yeah, that makes sense then. Try to download the correct XP touchpad driver and software from http://support.dell.com/. It will probably be listed as an Input device.
As previously mentioned in regard to ALPS (which is most common on Dells), there’s usually an app running in the taskbar (or you could always go to the task manager - but be careful) that allows you to disable the touchpad. As something of a roadwarrior, always working from a laptop, I find that when space allows (i.e. not on a plane or not working right on my lap), I prefer to disable the touchpad and use a real-live (albeit miniature) mouse (preferably laser and preferably wireless).
i finally downloaded the correct driver and disabled my touchpad (yaaae!). thanks for everyones help. i’m thinking that missing drivers is what is causing my problems with using my 50" panasonic tv as a monitor for my laptop. (from this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8201714#post8201714 )