Laptops are designed to be used without computer mice. They have a touchpad instead. But not all the people using laptops like this touchpad or find it useful . Most of them think that it is much easier to attach an external mouse and use it, as it is easier to use and it’s a lot more precise. Not to mention the fact that it is a lot faster, too. So they choose to toggle their Gateway laptop touchpad. Some want to do this because they touch it by mistake when typing something and using the keyboard and this leads to some misleading commands that can be really disturbing when you are in the middle of something important for work for example. Most laptops offer you this possibility, even if they have different producers and models, or even different software, as any hardware device must have a command that turns it on and off.
I am not sure about other operating systems, but if you want to toggle your touchpad on your Gateway laptop and you have Windows XP installed on it, just go to My Computer, Control Panel, Pointing devices and you will find there the settings that you need to turn the touchpad on and off. You can disable it even if you do not have an external mouse attached to your laptop because it bothers you when you are typing for instance. You can turn it on again when you finish your work or you can use the keyboard instead.
Well, believe it or not, some people are just too lazy to do even that and want some keyboard shortcuts or any kind of shortcuts on their desktop to allow them to toggle the touchpad with a single click of the mouse. Problem solved for them, too. There is this website – www.autohotkey.com where you can download a free, open-source utility for Windows that helps you make the best use of your keyboard. You can set it so that you can access a lot of commands by a simple key stroke or a certain combo of key strokes. AutoScriptWriter II comes with it and it helps you record two scrips: one for turning on the Gateway laptop touchpad and one for turning it off.
After the recording just put them on your desktop to be handy when you want to use them. When you double click either of them AutoScript will start running automatically , then will run the script which will do its job according to the one you picked up (turn on or off the touchpad) and then will exit automatically. When you want to toggle, just double click the other script that will cause the reverse: if the touchpad was turned on it will shut it and if it was shut , it will turn it on. It’s as simple as you can ever want.
And if you decide to use an external mouse only, just use the settings to turn the touchpad off and leave them like that until you change your mind or your laptop.