Question about the BIOS on a Dell laptop, about a decade old

[struggle4progress]

My father has an old Dell inspiron. I think the touchpad may be damaged, because the cursor arrow drifts towards the bottom left corner of the screen. The machine is probably too old to be worth repairing, but a USB mouse would work with it

He lives in a different state from me, so I don't have the machine in front of me

My question is: can the touchpad be disabled in the BIOS?

[canetoad]

1. You may not even need to disable the touch pad

Why not try plugging in a USB mouse before doing anything else.

[struggle4progress]

2. I tried that when I saw him at Christmas. The mouse worked but didn't stop the drift.

Things got busy and I never thought to try the BIOS. And he's a casual user and has probably never touched the BIOS.

[CK_John]

3. Go to support dot dell dot com and check the model for a switch usually in front

to turn off the touch pad. If no switch, look for icon in contol panel that sets options for touchpad and set off.

Another option would be to use the tools option in Ccleaner and disable in the startup apt the touchpad from starting.

On these older machines I use a ps2 optical mouse. About 9 dollars at Wally World.

[struggle4progress]

4. Many thanks for your useful suggestions!

The switch doesn't appear in the manual, but I think he'll have to try mouse properties via the control panel

The PS2 mouse is a good idea, too, since the stinkin machine has only one USB port

:)