Dead laptop touchpad

Woke up this morning, used my laptop and everything was in fine order and then I went out for a walk and when I returned, to my horror; a dead laptop touchpad. Wondering what the problem could possibly be I quickly went online to google to get my wealth of answers. Unfortunately i kept going around in circles and getting nowhere fast. Next stop was the manufacturer's website and they were equally unimpressive in helping with my broken laptop touchpad. Throughout the day i kept plugging away, uninstalling and re installing drivers, hitting the Fn (function key) with various combinations of the F1, F2,F3.........F12 keys without much success. The following is a quick diagnostic to let you know whether your broken laptop touchpad is a simple software fix or a more costly and painful hardware fix.

Step1

Go to your control panel and locate your mouse icon (it should be in the devices and hardware category). Once you have found it, right click it and select properties. Depending on your manufacturer you may see a dialogue box labelled 'Enable'. If this box is unchecked then it imply means you accidentally turned of your touchpad. Many laptop touchpads can be activated/deactivated by using the function keys and you may have inadvertently done this. Usually there will be a touchpad icon on one of the function keys if your laptop supports this feature.

Step2

If it is not a simple case of re enabling your laptop touchpad then try updating the drivers for the touchpad. This can be done by locating the device manager (you can use your laptop's search feature to help locate this section). Once inside the device manager, locate the mouse icon and right click it; in the dialogue box that pops up, click on update driver. if you are using windows 7 it can automatically search for the driver for you, otherwise you will have to go to your manufacturer's website and try to locate it under their support/downloads/drivers section. If this still does not solve the problem try uninstalling the re installing the driver.

Step3

If the above dont work then you could try getting a usb mouse and see if it works. If it works unplug it then restart your computer and see if your broken laptop touchpad starts working again. If it does not then we are moving into drastic measures....

Drastic Measure 1

You may have to re-install your operating system. personally time consuming and inconvenient with backing up of data and such and also risky as if the problem is a hardware problem then you would have done it for zero,zilch, nothing, nada.

Drastic Measure 2

Take it to a technician and let them check it out. You may require a new laptop touchpad (if available) or may have to replace your laptop! If you cant afford to do that at the moment then an external usb mouse can hold you over until you can afford to.