5 Ways to Disable Touchpad When Typing in Windows
If you spend several hours at a time working on your laptop computer, it is important that you make sure to sit with the correct posture and try to use your touchpad and keyboard from the correct angle to put less stress on your arms or wrists. Many users that do serious work while the computer is in a static position on a desk or table might use an external keyboard and mouse to make things more comfortable.
The problem with trying to use your standard laptop keyboard in a comfortable position is the touchpad happens to be rather inconveniently placed. It’s not hard to often find yourself touching the pad or buttons with the palm of your hand while typing and moving the cursor from the current position to another part of the page. On some laptops, you can use hotkeys like Fn+F7 to disable the touchpad, but many computers don’t have such a function either built in or via the touchpad’s own driver software.
There is plenty of software around to disable the mouse/touchpad and keyboard completely, but less available to only disable the touchpad while you type on the keyboard. Here we have found 5 options for you to try out.
1. Touchpad BlockerTouchpad Blocker blocks clicks during typing which helps prevent the cursor from involuntary jumping. An advantage this tool has is there are some useful configuration options so you can at least set a few things up to your liking. Do note that clicks and movements from a standard mouse are also blocked during typing with Touchpad Blocker. This is the only tool in the list that has been updated in the Windows 10 era (2016).
A valuable option is the one to set the threshold at which the touchpad will be able to move again after you stop typing. The time interval to block clicks and movement is between 0.1 seconds and 3 seconds. If you set it to 1, the cursor cannot move and no clicks register until 1 second after the last keypress. This can be individually configured by the “Also block move and wheel events” and “Block accidental taps and clicks” checkboxes.
Touchpad Blocker can also be turned on and off temporarily using a defined hotkey, the default is Ctrl+F9. An option that may be greyed out is fully disabling the touchpad with a keyboard shortcut. Although it is supposed to work with Synaptics touchpads, the option wasn’t available with our Dell Synaptics touchpad.
2. Touch Tamer
This small utility is written in the scripting language AutoHotkey. It can block the actions of left and right touchpad clicks as well as the cursor moving too far while typing on your keyboard. Although it’s from 2011, we found Touch Tamer worked on our Dell laptop running Windows 10.
Touch Tamer is portable and has no user interface, just a tray icon and accompanying context menu that allows you to suspend the blocking or open the settings. Opening the settings simply opens an ini file in Notepad with a “Period=500” option. This is the time in milliseconds that the touchpad will become active again after you stop typing. Although the touchpad movement blocking is not totally effective, it does at least slow the movement of the cursor while you are typing.
3. TouchFreeze
TouchFreeze is a free and simple utility for Windows that automatically disables the touchpad while you are typing in text. As you can see in the screenshot, there is only one thing to configure in TouchFreeze via clicking on the tray icon, and that is whether you want to start the program with Windows.
Just install the program and by default, it autoruns when Windows is booted up anyway so you only need to access the menu to turn TouchFreeze off. Even though TouchFreeze was updated in 2012 after a long break, it still seems to be quite hit and miss about which laptops it will work on and which ones it won’t.
4. Touchpad Pal
The way Touchpad Pal works is pretty much the same as TouchFreeze which will stop your mouse from moving while you type on the keyboard. Although the program comes as a setup installer, it can easily be opened with 7-Zip and the standalone TouchpadPal.exe executable extracted to where you like.
The window above is accessed by clicking on the tray icon but serves no real purpose apart from saying how many clicks have been blocked. The Settings button does nothing and only asks if you want to try the author’s shareware Laptop Assistant. Like the other tools listed here, Touchpad Pal might work on one laptop and not another, so you need to check it out to find if it works for you.
5. Reducing Touchpad Sensitivity in Windows 10
Windows 10 has a built in option that tries to help reduce the number of accidental clicks on the touchpad while you are typing. It doesn’t disable the touchpad while typing but essentially raises or lowers the amount of touch pressure needed to activate movement on the touchpad.
Go to Settings > Devices > Touchpad, click the “Touchpad sensitivity” dropdown and change the setting to “Low sensitivity”. Try typing and see if it has helped reduce accidental touchpad clicks. Change the level back to Medium if it doesn’t make any difference.
My last comment should have said “…hold down the F12 key…’
I tried everything to disable the touchpad on my Dell laptop. Most of the procedures listed onlne say to find the touchpad (on/off) switch in settings. But on my computer, it simply is not there. Here is a solution that will work. It is not what Dell recommends, but it works:
1) Hold down the while booting your computer
2) Select “Bios Setup” at the boot menu.
3) Go to “System Configuration”
4) Go to “Mouse/Touchpad”
5) Select “Serial Mouse”
6) Exit and restart your computer.
The exact path will vary depending on the BIOS you have, but if you turn off the touchpad at the BIOS level, there is nothing Dell or Microsoft can do about it.
It works, but the problem is it freezes the attached mouse alongside the touchpad.
That is the objective -to turn off the entire touchpad/mouse built into the laptop so I can type without changing focus every time my thumb happens to touch the touchpad surface. I use an external serial mouse and that is the only mouse I want to be active.
Touchpad blocker does not work on win 10.
does it work with Pages?
On my HP laptop does the touchpadblocker not work 0 nothing !
“totally disabled any ability to disable the touchpad.” – someone left this comment.
I wonder if this guy owns an ASUS maybe? Because I noticed the very same problem and saw some other people asking about it. I was able to fix it using the OEM supplied ASUS Smart Gesture application/drivers that one can find at the support.asus.com website. I installed the newest windows 10 drivers and then opened the Smart Gesture console and selected the Checkbox to disable the touchpad when a mouse was plugged in and it did not work. Ok, so after that I went into Device Manager and right-clicked the touchpad driver and selected to update driver. I let windows search for a new driver and it found something, then after a reboot the Asus Smart Gesture software was blocking the touchpad as long as my mouse was plugged into USB. Maybe that will help someone.
wow legit just had to click update drivers and it installed asus sg that worked properly. i wish win10 did this on its own. thx fam youre the man.
You are amazing! I’ve been looking for a fix for so long. I even contacted microsoft and they couldn’t figure it out. Thank you.
Windows 10 recent update 2019 has recently totally disabled any ability to disable the touchpad. Why these bastards did this can only one reason…maliciousness.
Very nice tip Raymond.. Thank you from the Hawaiian Islands,
John
Touchpad Blocker used to be a lifesaver when it stopped the cursor from dancing around. However, it became a villain in recent times. I don’t know if this happened after installing Windows 10. Recently my touchpad cursor stopped working with Office Excel. There is a community out there struggling with this problem. I just discovered that disabling the Touchpad Blocker is all that I need to do to get my cursor working again with Excel.
Touchpad Blocker will have to work on this issue. For now, I disable Touchpad Blocker when working with Excel.
None of the above work on Windows 10. Maybe someone knows a current software that would do it?
Touchpad Blocker works well for me under Windows 10. As noted in the article, these tools are a bit hit and miss about what laptops they work on and the type of touchpad.
I had installed TouchFreeze, which didn’t seem to work on Windows 10. Touchpad Blocker seems to work a treat.
In some applications, the cursor completely disappears, which is a good indication it’s actually working. As I’m typing this in Chrome I can see the cursor, but it’s not moving. The “clicks blocked” counter remains at zero, but I can live with that.
Touchpad Blocker has been an essential install for my laptop from the first time I came across it some years back. The newer version adds handy options and works seamlessly on Win 7. Highly recommended especially as the years roll on!
Nice program and I need only 2 seconds to install this application. As laptop user, I also experienced the same problem. Thanks Ray!
I love it!… needed this for a long time!
Hi Raymond,
Nice tip (as usual)!!
-Prasanna
OMG you’re a lifesaver. I used to have an Acer laptop, and I liked the touchpad disable function very much. Now that I have a Dell, I thought I would just have to live with the annoyance of touching the pad every time I typed. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!! You have enlightened me.
thanks…
thanks…
i’m fans of you from indonesia
nice, this is useful! thank you
wow.. simple and practical.
Excellent … keep it up
your blog is very informative
thanks… nice information
Thank you Raymond! You have solved a huge problem I was having.
Couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve had the same problems. Having to stop typing, fix errors after finding the cursor moved, and even having to start all over after losing all the work…a real pain.
This is one feature that should be automatically installed on all laptops.
thanks for this software ray.. now i can work with ease….
great software , thanks a lot
Thank you for sharing a wonderful piece of information..
Cheers..!!
Thank you Raymond , nice program as usual :-)