mousenetbooktouchpadwindows 7
This is the first computer I have ever bought and I couldn't bring it home without a mouse of its own. I'm trying to disable the touchpad but the only option I find is by uninstalling the drivers, which I think is a bit drastic, the buttons for activation and deactivation are disabled (I'm using windows 7 starter).
Do you have any idea of how to disable the touch pad when an external mouse is hooked up?
If you're using Windows XP and the Synaptics driver is installed on your Eee PC you can find advanced settings here:
edit: install the Windows Vista Driver from the Synaptics support page (no Win7 driver available yet, but the Vista driver works.
(I'm 99% sure, the 900HA features the Synaptics touchpad, the ElanTec touchpad for the Eee PC was introduced later with the 901)
If you want to disable the touchpad altogether, try TouchFreeze or MS DevCon (can't say whether they work with 7 though).
Instead of trying to brute-force kill the device -- check if you can install the driver package for the touchpad. It's likely you have either a Synaptics or Alps touchpad. In either case, the software has an option to disable the touchpad upon connecting an external mouse (haven't looked for an option that disables it for good though).
If that doesn't work out -- this is sort of a stretch, but maybe try changing the driver to something that "breaks" that device and prevents it from working? Like intentionally making it throw the yellow exclamation mark inside Device Manager.
Also, i8042prt is the driver that controls the PS/2 controller in general -- perhaps there's something you can do with that? I'm going to guess disabling it would be bad since that'll likely take out your keyboard too.
Best Answer
It depends on the driver you have, if it is an Synaptics touchpad, you can disable it by right clicking on the taskbar icon.
For Alps, I think you can do it from the mouse properties in Control Panel.
For anything else, or different versions, just hunt around a mix of the above - either the mouse options or taskbar icon.