Stuck with the mouse!

[flicrat]

Hi all! Sorry to be an idiot,but I have an Acer aspire laptop that I could use with either the touch panel or the mouse, but it has now deided only to work with the mouse. My children and grandchildren prefer that, but I like touching the panel better. Of course I move the cursor and left click on the panel and wonder why nothing happens till I remember I have to use the mouse!! What have I done? and how can I change it please? I need to have both options available.I have Windows Vista if it helps.

[Mosaic]

Unplug the mouse, then look at your keyboard - see the Fn key, botom left - it is often written on in blue rather than white. Now look at the top row of your keyboard - one of the keys may have a little blue mouse icon alonside the 'F7' (or whatever). Try pressing FN and this mouse key together, and test if that gets your mousepad back working.

[flicrat]

Thanks Mosaic. Will try that. I did unplug mouse yesterday but did not press any keys,so when I replugged it in, same as before

[flicrat]

No Go I am afraid.

[Prudie]

Not based on any technical knowledge at all but my last laptop had a little button above the touch pad that enabled/disabled it. You don't have that and it has accidentally been pressed?

[flicrat]

Thanks for that Prudie. I don't have a button and am very bemused. I am sure you are right and I have disabled something, but my "Windows vista for Dummies " book assumes you are using a mouse anyway and has nothing helpful on the touch pad.

[Prudie]

Problem solved

This evening my granddaughter brought the notebook to me so that I could assess the situation at first hand – previous information was from telephone conversations.
Out of interest I just googled 'Acer aspire touchpad not working' and see this has appeared as a problem on other forums. One was solved by this answer:

Looking at the keyboard I found a help key combination Fn-F1 which produced a menu listing several hot key combinations. One such combination was Fn-F7 which toggled the touchpad enabled/disabled.

[Prudie]

^^^ Sorry that looks totally random, don't know what happened but I had typed that I found this on another forum when I googled acer aspire touchpad not working!!

[flicrat]

Thanks but Fn F7 has no effect.Interesting Fn F1 site though.

[wildwood]

Going back to Prudie's first answer....... It may not be an actual button. Mine (HP) has a very small slide on the top of the pad that turns it on/off.

Have another look, it won't hurt.

[flicrat]

The interesting part is that fn f7 brings up the message Touch pad Enabled (or Disabled) at the bottom of the screen but it still won't work on Enabled which seems strange.

[flicrat]

Sorry wildwood, should have said thank you to you too.Touchpad is plain unfortunatel. I seem to lack all these helpful little gadgets! Guess I may have to get in touch with the person who set up my computer for me and hope he knows what to do. Obviously I can use a mouse so am not stuck really but just prefer the touchpad.