What to do when Touchpad is not working

Is your touchpad or trackpad having trouble scrolling, clicking or zooming? Gesture controls not working properly? Here’s what to do if the touchpad isn’t working or behaving abnormally. No matter how powerful your laptop is – the touchpad can help or ruin your experience. After all, it’s your primary point of interaction with your computer, so if your cursor is slow, inaccurate, or jumping all over the place, you’re sure not having fun. Are you tired of dealing with a laptop that does not work touchpad, here are some solutions that may help you.

10 things to do when Touchpad is not working

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1. Clean the touchpad

It’s disgusting to think about it, but there’s a lot of dirt, dust, and skin oils that can build up on your laptop over time. If it’s been a while since you last cleaned it, take a soft cloth, moisten it with some water (or isopropyl alcohol, if necessary), and wipe the touchpad thoroughly.

2. Adjust your settings

Not all touchpads are created equal, but there is a good chance your laptop’s drivers will allow you to adjust some settings, allowing you to customize how your touchpad responds to your movements. Go up Settings> Devices> Touchpad and change the sensitivity of the touchpad. Also, you can turn off the tap-to-click features or the feature in the lower right corner which is enabled by default. Multi-touch gestures may also cause problems, so turn them off if you find that you keep using them accidentally. Go up Settings> Devices> Mouse> Additional Mouse Options, you can also try to enable or disable Improve pointer precision.

Many modern laptops use touchpads designed with Microsoft’s drivers in mind, but older models may still use drivers from manufacturers such as Elan or Synaptics. If your laptop falls into this category, you may have other hidden settings in Windows that offer more control. Go to the same Additional Mouse Options window mentioned above and look for an additional tab with touchpad settings – you’ll often find hidden options. If that card is missing but you know you have a Synaptics touchpad, you may be able to fix it restoring the driver o using a registry modificationalthough we haven’t tested this practice.

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If the touchpad doesn’t work for Mac users, go to System Preferences> Trackpad to view settings that control pointing and clicking, scrolling, zooming, and gesture controls. In Point and Click, you can adjust the tracking speed, controls to perform a secondary click, and change the tap-to-click setting, which can cause a lot of accidental clicks if it’s on. Click Scroll & Zoom to adjust the gesture controls for zooming in and out and rotating the screen. In More gestures, you can customize various swipe and pinch gestures to open certain apps or scroll through different windows. These gestures can be turned off or, if you accidentally continue to perform an action, changed to be easier or harder to perform.

3. Download new drivers

If your laptop is not automatically updated to the latest drivers for your touchpad, you may find that some improvements have been made in the recent past. Go to the manufacturer’s website such as Dell, Lenovo, etc., and enter your laptop’s model number on their support page. Manually download the latest driver, install it on your system and see if that helps. I’ve also seen rare cases where users report success with too BIOS update.

You can also try searching for your specific PC model to see if others have had similar problems. Note, that you need to proceed with caution ed back up your computer before resorting to experimental solutions recommended by others. Some users may report good results with unofficial drivers not designed for that specific laptop, but this is just as likely to make matters worse. A popular trick from 2017, for example, involved installing Lenovo Precision drivers on non-Precision laptops, but it no longer works on updated versions of Windows 10.

4. Use only one finger

It will sound silly, but listen to me: just like the iPhone 4, you could be wrong and now the trackpad is not working. Changing the way you place your hand on the laptop could help improve its responsiveness. Most touchpads have a form of integrated palm sensing, which aims to distinguish between the pointing finger and the thumb or palm resting on the underside of the trackpad. But this feature works better on some laptops than others, and if yours has less effective palm sensing, it may not work well if you rest your thumb on the bottom for easy clicking. Try using the trackpad with only one finger at a time and you may find that it works better. It’s far from ideal, but if you just need a working trackpad while looking for a fix, this could help make your laptop usable again.

5. Look for a hardware problem

If your laptop mouse doesn’t work despite the software solutions, it’s time to start checking the hardware. If you’re not comfortable opening your laptop, you can take it to a store or contact the manufacturer. If it’s not under warranty you will be surprised how far it goes with a small screwdriver. Look at the trackpad. Isn’t it uniform? Old batteries can swell under the trackpad, causing it to lift and behave erratically. Even if you cleaned the surface of the laptop, the internal parts may have water damage. In other cases, the trackpad flat cable may simply be loose or the trackpad itself is faulty, in which case you can often find replacement parts online and replace them right away.

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use a mouse

You probably didn’t want to hear that, but here’s the reality: some laptops only have terrible trackpads, and no amount of tweaking will make it top-notch. If you are not ready for buy a new laptop, it may be time to grit your teeth and resort to using the mouse. There are many fantastic mouse wireless which will make your experience much more enjoyable, at least when you are sitting at your desk. Learn the keyboard shortcuts it will also mean less time spent with your finger on a trackpad that isn’t working. They’re also faster than any mouse, so they may be more useful in the end.