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Author Topic: Sharing a Touchpad lockout tool while typing in case anyone needs this  (Read 2918 times)

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DaveLembke

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Finally got frustrated with my ASUS laptop where the touchpad is too sensitive and I will be typing and if my hand accidentally touches or brushes against the surface it will move my pointer to a different section of whatever I am typing making a jumble mess.

Google on this subject talks about going into mouse settings and there (might be) a setting there to set the touchpad to disable when keys are typed. My laptop doesnt have anything there of this kind. It was originally a Windows 8 laptop when purchased and I bought a license of Windows 7 to apply to it. ASUS dont have any touchpad drivers for this model and so its using the generic driver that Windows 7 64-bit installed with with no problems in functionality.

So I went to track down a piece of software that I read about years ago on PCWorld and found this article here:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/204693/Disable_Your_Laptops_Touchpad_While_You_Type_Windows_7_Edition.html

Years ago I had a Toshiba Qosmio that was running XP and I used the TouchFreeze utility which worked well. I forgot the name of this utility so I went into first searching to see if Microsoft made a touchpad lockout feature as part of the OS feaures but didnt find one for Windows 7, so then I refined my search to touchpad lockout and PCWorld and found the article above, and it talks about sometime typing to use the older TouchFreeze with Windows 7 and it not working. So PCWorld updated this article to include a newer free utility Touchpad Pal that can solve for this problem. I scanned it first before installing and it scanned clean. Installed it and its working with no problems as now I am typing and intentionally moving against touchpad to try to get it to mess up and the utility is working as intended and a pop up bubble tab messaged from the tray icon that it prevented the accidental touchpad interaction.  ;D

Here is direct link to touchpadpal if anyone needs it: http://tpp.desofto.com/

*Note: It adds a shortcut to desktop but its accessible through system tray. Clicking on this shortcut on desktop... nothing happens... so its kind of pointless to be there.  ::) But there isnt any configuring for the free edition. When its installed its enabled and it keeps track of how many times it blocked the touchpad from interfering with keystrokes. There is a Laptop Assistant extension for this software that costs $7.45 USD if you need more features. http://la.desofto.com/?tpp

If anyone knows of any better utilities to share on this subject... please add to this.

Attached image shows what it displays when trying to access settings and features. Everything is locked out on this free utility. Clicking on settings refers you to buy the other Laptop Assistant product that works with this and gives feature options.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

strollin



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Re: Sharing a Touchpad lockout tool while typing in case anyone needs this
« Reply #1 on: January 24, 2018, 12:04:55 PM »
Good find!  I always disable the touchpad on my laptops when the driver allows but never thought to see if there was a generic tool for when the driver doesn't allow for disabling the touchpad.


Mark.



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Re: Sharing a Touchpad lockout tool while typing in case anyone needs this
« Reply #2 on: January 24, 2018, 02:01:10 PM »
was there no Fn key combo that turns the touchpad on and off?
all the laptops I've seen have such a feature (for that very need).

BC_Programmer


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Re: Sharing a Touchpad lockout tool while typing in case anyone needs this
« Reply #3 on: January 24, 2018, 05:58:17 PM »
There is a similar "syndaemon" package on Linux distributions which locks out clicks for a configurable amount of time after a key is pressed, preventing palm-clicks while typing.
I was trying to dereference Null Pointers before it was cool.