Can I disable or reassign a Laptop Mouspad pseudo "ACTION" key

[ALAN_BR]

I always rest my thumbs below the space bar when I am typing.

I now have an Acer Laptop 244 LM with a terrible habit :-
When I am typing text it will randomly decide to drastically shift the insertion point of my stream of keyboard characters.
It is never a graceful shift - it is always a terrible lurch to a distant region of the screen.

Specifically, whilst I am typing I only see the cursor at the point where I am inserting text.
If I then move the USB mouse or stroke the touch pad mouse a second cursor appears in a totally different part of the screen.  I may continue typing at the first cursor position, and the second cursor can disappear.   The second cursor position is remembered and a slight stroke causes it to reappear and start moving from the old position.
Regardless of whether the second cursor is visible or not, as soon as the mouse pad sees a thumb twitch it resurrects and tells the O.S. to instantly align the text insertion point to this stupid mouse position.

It is such a pain that I have to remember to disable the mouse pad with Fn-F7,
but this seems to be a pure hardware I/O feature that cannot be controlled by software.

I am happy to lose the entire mouse pad, and am about to instant glue a cover over it,
but would prefer to use a batch file or something on start-up.

I would like to try to reassign the "ACTION" key issued by the mouse pad to a harmless null action which will allow my thumbs to twitch and not disrupt my composition.

I would appreciate advice upon any batch or VBS script that could do this under XP Home with SP3.

Alan

[Linux711]

I think the easiest way would be to open up the laptop and unplug the mouse pad. Writing a vbscript or batch to disable this is impossible. Some assembly code would probably have to be written, and I am not good enough at that to make this work.

[ALAN_BR]

Thanks, I am looking into your suggestion.

Before I retired I specialized in real-time embedded software for Alarm systems,
but was happy to have a shot at replacing the quad zif socket based processors and logic devices - though the zif extractor some-times suffered, and if anything broke there were more in the stores.

Now I am here alone, being very cautious about risking any damage to my one and only computer.
I managed to replace a 256 MB stick with 1 GB - anxious waiting for the first restart.
I did not have courage to thump the HDD hard enough for an upgrade,
but my son works in IT and did the job for me.

I would like to know what perils I face before I attempt to disconnect the mouse pad.
I would appreciate advice upon how to gain access - preferably with diagrams.
(my son lives 200 miles away and I have no on site service agreement ! ! !)

Regards
Alan