XP not detecting hardware (touchpad)

I have got a Acer Aspire laptop that froze all of a sudden recently and therefore I had to reboot it but when I did that, the Synaptics TouchPad v6.2 on PS/2 Port3 stopped working. So, I removed the driver and and then tried to reinstall it but now the laptop is not able to detect the touchpad even after installing the driver. Also, there is some weird thing going with my laptop, whenever I restart it then I get a message that tells me a printer was detected although I do not have any printer installed locally nor in a network and the installation of this printer always fails? Can anyone tell me how do I get the TouchPad working back again? Thanks for any replies.

Did you check if a usb mouse is working or not? You can even try to do a system restore to the day before the freezing problem started. It also sounds to me like the touchpad driver got corrupted or it might be interferring with something else in your computer, perhaps a software or so.

I asked Acer Tech support about this same issue and they gave me a solution for same. It seems there is a key combination like FN + F7 that is needed to pressed to activate the touchpad and at the time of the crash, it got deactivated somehow. So, I uninstalled the driver and then uninstalled the hardware from device manager and then rebooted my system. After when it was detected and installed itself, then I pressed the same keys to turn it back on. Thanks for the suggestions anyhow.