Dell Turn Off Touchpad
Log on as administrator. Control panel / device manager. Look under mice. If there is a 'Dell touchpad' or 'synaptics ' or whatever touchpad you have you need to disable it, if there is a disable option.Now for the proper solution. Many trackpads appear as normal mice under Windows.
Turn Off Touchpad Gateway
So that when Windows loads it sees a normal mouse connected and installs its standard drivers. In many cases it will say PS/2 mouse.You need to disable the built-in drivers for this 'PS/2 mouse'. When Windows loads it will still see the 'mouse/trackpad' but will not be able to load he PS/2 mouse drivers.
Find 'C:WindowsSystem32DriverStoreFileRepositorymsmouse.infamd64neutral7a5f47d3150cc0eb'and inside this directory find 'sermouse.sys' which you must rename to 'sermouse.sys.old' (or something). To do that you will need to take ownership of the file: right click, security, advanced, owner, edit, change owner to administrators, all the way back out, then properties (again), security, edit, get the administrators in and give them full control.
After that rename the file.Then you go to 'C:WindowsSystem32drivers' and do the same renaming to 'sermouse.sys'.Also in 'C:WindowsSystem32driversen-US' the same to 'sermouse.sys.mui'After all that go to Control panel - devices - mice - right click on the PS/2 mouse and 'disable'.Reboot. It may vary with the model of Dell laptop that you have.
I have an Inspiron 17 3721. To disable the touchpad, I use FN+F3. The F3 button on the keyboard actually has a picture on it of a touchpad with an 'X' across it. This Fn+F3 shortcut was listed in the Quick Start Guide that came with my laptop.
Maybe you will be able to find something similar for your laptop. If Fn+F3 doesn't work, I suggest checking your laptop's manuals, which you may be able to find on the Dell website, listed by model of computer.
For instance, for my model of computer, the Quick Start Guide is here:. First test run unsuccessful. Went to Control Panel Hardware Mouse. Gives no indication of how to disable touch pad. Also, can't locate Synaptics Properties. HELP!!!This is how I fixed this issue on my Dell laptop: I wasn't able to find Synaptics installed. I downloaded the Synaptics driver from the Synaptics website, installed it, rebooted computer.
Then I went into Mouse properties in Control Panel and disabled it. Before installing the Synaptics driver, the Disable button for the touchpad was grayed out.