Notebook touchpad stopped working

Matt — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:18:58 +0000

My current laptop is a (rather heavy) Dell Vostro 1700 which I chose as a compromise between outright performance and of course price. I upgraded from the preinstalled Vista Home 32bit to the 64bit version of Vista Ultimate. I recently (mistakenly and stupidly as it turns out) installed the tablet PC software with Windows updates and since then the touchpad has stopped working. I don’t use the touchpad unless I absolutely have to but even so, I knew that if I didn’t sort it out sooner or later I would get stuck. I did a quick search and found this forum entry where someone had just added a comment to say they thought it had coincided with installing the tablet PC software. There were several suggestions that hadn’t seemed to resolve the issue for various people so I started to dig around for myself.

My first thought was to uninstall the tablet PC software so I went to Control Panel > Programs and Features expecting to see something obvious for Tablet PC. Nothing there so I clicked the link to Turn Windows features on or off and then unchecked the Tablet PC Optional Components box. This had no effect so I opened Control Panel > Device Manager and expanded the Human Interface Devices node. There was an entry for IdeaCom HID Touch Screen (PS/2) so I right clicked it and selected Uninstall (and I selected the option to remove the driver). The system prompted me to reboot and hey presto, when Vista restarted my touchpad had come back to life.

I posted this resolution as a suggested answer on the forum thread and have doubled up here in case anyone with the issue spots this post in a search result.

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Posted in Laptop Tagged: Community, Troubleshooting, Vista

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Notebook touchpad stopped working