Most of the time, we connect an external mouse to our Windows laptop for convenience. At the same, we face difficulties while typing as we tend to touch the touchpad accidentally. Microsoft came with a feature to disable the touchpad temporarily as long as the external mouse is connected to your Windows 10 device. The plus point is this feature is completely automated, and you can automatically enable the touchpad when the mouse is disconnected, and set to automatically disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected. In this article, we shall be walking you through the steps to disable the touchpad when an external mouse is connected. This can be achieved in below-mentioned ways,
- Leave Precision Touchpad On or Off when Mouse is Connected in Settings
- Leave Precision Touchpad On or Off when Mouse is Connected using a REG file
- Leave Synaptics Touchpad On or Off when Mouse is Connected in Control Panel
Please note that this particular tutorial applies to Synaptics touchpad only.
Leave Precision Touchpad On or Off when Mouse is Connected in Settings:
- Press the “Win + I” keys together to open the Settings app.
- Click on the “Devices” icon.
- Tap on the “Touchpad” option from the left-hand side.
- On the right-hand pane, check(on) or uncheck(off) the Leave touchpad on when a mouse is connected check box as per your requirement.
- Now you can close the Settings app. To verify the settings please plug/unplug the external mouse.
Leave Precision Touchpad On or Off when Mouse is Connected using a REG file:
Microsoft provides you with another way to turn on or off the Touchpad when an external mouse is connected to your Windows 10 device. Here, we are talking about modifying your device’s registry; before proceeding further, please make sure to take a backup of your registry. Please follow the below-mentioned steps,
- Press the “Win + R” keys on your keyboard to open the Run dialog box.
- Type “regedit” and hit the enter key to open the Registry editor.
- Navigate to the below-mentioned path,
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PrecisionTouchPad
- Create a new DWORD property with below details,
Name: LeaveOnWithMouse
Type: DWORD
Value: ffffffff (hex) = Check (off)
0 = Uncheck (on)
- Click on the Ok button to save the changes. Now you can close the registry editor.
In case you find difficulties in facing executing the above steps, please download the reg file and double click to merge the changes to the registry.
Download link:
Once the registry file is merged to the registry, please plug/unplug the external mouse to check the Touchpad status.
Leave Synaptics Touchpad On or Off when Mouse is Connected in Control Panel:
The Synaptics UI is specific to the driver version and may vary in your case. Please follow the below-mentioned steps,
- Open the Control Panel app and tap on the Mouse icon.
- Click on the “Touchpad” setting in the mouse properties.
- Check(off) or uncheck(on) (default) the Disable internal pointing device when external USB pointing device is attached checkbox for what you want, and click/tap on OK.
- To verify the status of touchpad setting please plug/unplug the external mouse.
Conclusion:
In this article, we have walked you through the steps to enable/disable the touchpad when the mouse is connected in your Windows 10 device. In case you find difficulties executing the above steps, please leave a comment below.
