How to Disable Touchpad - Compaq 6735s Notebook w/Synaptics Touchpad - Windows Vista Ultimate x64.
Like many of us - when I pick up a new notebook - one of the first things I want to know how to do is to disable to onboard touch pad/buttons - when I plug in a wireless or wired external mouse.
The Compaq 6735s is a new, lightweight AMD dual core 64 bit system that handles 8GB of RAM and sports a 250GB SATA drive. I found a great deal on this through TigerDirect...
The Compaq uses the Synaptics Pointing Device drivers for the onboard mouse pad and buttons. Be sure to check the HP Support-->Download Drivers/Software section to get the latest drivers for your unit. Dell and IBM notebooks are similar and their support sites should provide the latest download for the Synaptics driver for you - or whatever onboard touch pad driver you need.
NOTE: There does not appear to be any configuration in the BIOS or other firmware setup of this notebook to do this. In my Dell D830 Latitude - there is a BIOS setting that will disable the touch pad altogether, or you can do it using the support drivers that ship with the notebook.
Synaptics Options: Once the Synaptics drivers are installed - a system tray icon appears in the lower-right and you can open the Synaptics properties dialog. The only means of all BUT disabling this touch pad that I could find is to set the Sensitivity-->PalmCheck to MAXIMUM and the Touch Sensitivity to HEAVY. This should eliminate MOST of the erratic jumps of the cursor when you have your palms resting on the unit and typing.
I found some links Googling this - but nothing that really helped - and I'm not sure this will work for everyone - but thought I'd post it.
Any other insight / comments are always welcome.
Thanks...