How to disable touchpad on Windows 7?

Question

How can I disable the touchpad completely on Windows 7?

I have an Acer Aspire 5738Z. The reason that I want to disable the touchpad is that it at times decides to go haywire, clicking all over the screen and zooming. This is undesired behaviour, and since I use a USB-connected anyway, I'd be fine with not being able to use the touchpad.

Solution

This is generally not software related, but hardware related.

You can disable the touch-pad with a special button, you can find which in the manual.
You can find the manual for this model [Acer Aspire 5738Z]: here.
According to this, that button should be right next to the pad.

Whether a software solution exist depends on the drivers of the device, some drivers (and their software) allows disabling the pad from the software itself, some drivers have the option for the pad to be disabled when an external device is plugged etc'.

Comments

[Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007]

Touchpads are hardware and are not fully/universally controlled in the same way by Windows. We'll need more information on the computer type/make/model, and what exactly you want to accomplish before we can help.

[Admin]

@techie: I've added some info, is there anything more?

[Ben Lavender]

Techie has a good pointer there as a lot of vendors install their own software to manage the device, simply disabling it via that or devmgmt.msc will work or a function key as well if available.

[kinokijuf]

Uninstalling would cause windows to reinstall it on reboot.

[ChrisF]

Do you have any affiliation with this software?