How to disable or fix malfunctioning touchpad?

[Clipton]

I'm having this Sony VAIO VGN-N365E preinstalled with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium. I was facing some issues with the operating system so I restored it completely to the original factory settings. The restoration was successfully done, but after sometime I was getting this touchpad problem. The problems were that the touchpad was jumpy it use to tap and click by itself. I’ve tried a few things like I reinstalled the drivers; even I updated the drivers; I also uninstalled the drivers and windows installed windows installed its default drivers but nothing worked. Now I'm thinking that its hardware problem may be the touchpad has become faulty. And after disabling it I can use an external mouse which would be easier and also a permanent solution for this problem. But when I go to the Control Panel and located the mouse, the button to disable the Alps touchpad is grayed out –and I’m not able to click it but though I’m able to enable or disable the external USB mouse. Now my question here is how to disable the touchpad so that I can only use my external USB mouse? Please help me with this issue.

[Abhimanyusuta]

I would suggest you to try reinstalling the notebook Control and utility, which you can get from the Sony support website after which you can disable the tapping option and completely turn off the function or the web assistant scrolling. Then check your touchpad again to confirm that it is working fine. Else if you wish to completely disable your touchpad then you can do that from the VAIO control center, it manages your pointing devices. In VAIO control center go to pointing devices and then select the enable or disable option.

[Mumtaz86]

I was also having this kind of problem in my Acer Aspire 5745. The touchpad in my laptop also went jumpy sometimes and I thought that it was because of my fingers accidentally touching it but then I was very cautious about it and I never let my fingers touch it but this didn’t resolved my problem. I also tried reinstalling the drivers from the Acer’s website and also directly from the Alps website I even used the Driver Genius software to get the best available drivers for my touchpad but none of these solved my problem. Then I use to lock the touchpad whenever I was typing though this resolved my problem but also it was irritating to lock/unlock the touchpad every now and then but it was the only solution for my problem.

[Joshe]

I have read the whole post and the only thing I would suggest you to try changing your power supply. I have read it in many forums that when you are having a jumpy touchpad problem the first thing that you should check that whether your power supply is working fine or not and that are you facing the problem when you are running the laptop on battery if not then it is 100% sure that your power supply is gone bad and you need to change or repair it, this kind of issues are usually seen in the Acer laptop.

[Andrea000]

Your issue could be a power related issue but it is also possible that the power connector on your laptop is gone bad or is loose. I had this same problem on my Dell Latitude laptop and I gave it to a local laptop service center and they told me that the problem is related to my power adapter so I gave them my laptop’s power adapter to check and it was working fine then they disassembled my laptop and checked the power connector and they found it loose so they replaced it and now even after 2 years I never faced this problem again with my laptop. Or if you are sure that you want to disable the touchpad then you have to open your laptop and just remove the flat cable which goes from the touchpad to the motherboard and keeping it loose pack your laptop back, this will permanently disable the touchpad.