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Automatically disable your touchpad while you type with TouchFreeze
One thing about laptops that drives a lot of my customers nuts is the touchpad. If I had a nickel for every time someone brought a laptop in complaining that their mouse pointer suddenly jumped somewhere else on the screen and messed up their typing, I'd have at least $10.15. Hey, I'm in a small town - that would nearly count as an epidemic.
TouchFreeze is a tiny, open source program designed to fix this problem once and for all. Once you install it, TouchFreeze sits your in your system tray and waits for you to begin typing. When you do, it temporarily disables input from your touchpad.
Be forewarned: TouchFreeze may not work with your laptop's touchpad. It worked on my two Acer test systems just fine, but certain brands may be a bit less cooperative.
You can download TouchFreeze over at Google Code.
[via Addictive Tips]
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsDavidNov 25th 2009 1:14PM
No link?
aaronNov 25th 2009 3:12PM
Every Synaptics and Alps touchpad driver has an option to disable the touchpad while typing, but most people install an external mouse and that disables all the cool touchpad options until the touchpad driver is reinstalled!
OR Worse, at least for a Dell, you must also install Quickset which provides the extra touchpad features only when Quickset is running. They did this so that both the Synaptics and Alps touchpad settings appear identical, which makes it easier for technical support. Before that, both the Synaptics and Alps touchpad drivers would provide another 4-5 tabs to your mouse options in the control panel above the standard Buttons, Pointers, and Hardware tabs.
Until the driver is installed, you end up tapping the pad and the cursor jumps up a few lines, sometimes highlighting them, and then deleting them when you keep typing!
Tested on a Dell D630, Alps driver is installed but not currently set to disable when typing. Touchfreeze did not stop the cursor from moving while typing with and without Dell Quickset running.
With the Dell Quickset Alps touchpad set to disable while typing, the touchpad and stick are both disabled properly while typing.
So, if your touchpad is acting up, make sure the right driver is installed, and contact technical support to see if you need a separate program to actually give you the power to change the settings. Dell, for example, has a new Alps touchpad driver for Inspiron systems that actually simulates multitouch and some cool gestures, and it works with any Inspiron or Latitude with an Alps touchpad!
DafretyNov 29th 2009 4:45PM
You can just use the standard Alps or Synaptics drivers. That's what I do on my Dell, and it all works out.
aaronNov 29th 2009 6:55PM
lol yes, if you get rid of Dell Quickset and use the synaptics.com driver, it kicks butt! And there's fun synaptics utilities too! I love the theremin and the drum pads.
David Van (Cool Prizes Inc.)Nov 25th 2009 3:56PM
In my HP DV7-1133cl, it has a button to disable it. :)
Drew GreenNov 25th 2009 4:13PM
Nice find, Lee. I'm definitely going to install this on my Dell 1520. I'm running 7 x64. The Vista x86 driver had the option to disable the touchpad (I think) but it definitely disabled it when the external mouse was plugged in. The x64 Win 7 driver doesn't have either of these features (that I can tell), so this is the next best thing. Cheers!