Laptop Touchpad not working in Windows 7, 8 & 10

There can be many reasons why your laptop’s touchpad is not working. This happens with almost every windows user at least once. The very simplest solution here will be to restart your laptop as some users got it fixed by just restarting the laptop. Here I will assume that you have already done that but still the touchpad is not working.

As long it is not the hardware problem, your touchpad can be fixed by making right changes to laptop’s settings. But if the problem is with the hardware (touchpad) then it’s not possible to fix it by doing anything at the software level. Now let’s check for the methods one by one.

Below methods require mouse or touch input in order to make changes or you can do it from keyboard if you are comfortable.

5+ methods to fix “Touchpad not Working” in Windows

1. Enable your touchpad

This is the very first thing we check while troubleshooting the touchpad issue. You can actually enable and disable the touchpad from the settings. Let’s see if knowingly or unintentionally you disabled it or any program caused this problem.

Steps to Enable/disable touchpad in Windows

• Type main.cpl in the search bar and hit enter

OR

Go to Control Panel and click on Hardware and Sound

• Now click on the Mouse and a new dialogue box will open
• Click on Device Settings tab
• Enable the pointing device (Touchpad) under devices if it is disabled.
• Click on Ok to save the changes.

Most of the times users or programs make this change unknowingly, so making sure is a good thing. I tried few keyboard combinations to see if any keyboard shortcut can disable the touchpad. Surprisingly it did on my Lenovo laptop, I pressed the Fn+F6 and it disabled the touchpad. Pressing the same key again enables the touchpad. Yours can be a different combination, so if the above combination doesn’t work try holding the Fn+ press every Function button (F keys with symbol on them) one by one to see if any combination enables the touchpad.

Some combination can turn of the display (In my case it was Fn+F2) so don’t worry press the same key again and it will turn on again. Even after trying this if your touchpad is not working then implement the next method.

Also Read – Two Finger Scroll not working in Windows 10 [FIXED]

2. Enable/Disable touchpad from the BIOS

There is option to enable/disable the touchpad in the BIOS. So you may check if your touchpad is not disabled from the BIOS itself. To enter the BIOS, restart your laptop and start pressing the F2 or DEL (This button may vary but for most laptops these two are the most common, complete list of manufacturers with Key to enter BIOS) repeatedly as soon your laptop restarts.

Note: BIOS is a sensitive area, DO NOT mess any other settings if you don’t know what you are doing. Improperly configuring anything might break your system. Also mouse doesn’t work in BIOS so, use arrow keys to navigate through the tabs and options.

For different motherboards, BIOS has different interface but not completely different but slightly. Look for the “Internal Pointing Device” or something similar under all tabs. Mine is under the Advanced tab but your could be under different tab. Once you find the “Internal Pointing Device” or some similar name of touchpad, check if it is enabled or not. If it is disabled then enable it and save (F10 or yours can be different but it will show somewhere on the screen which key to press to save) the changes.

Now restart the laptop if it doesn’t restart automatically. Now check if your touchpad is working or not. If it’s working then congratulations! If it’s not then stick with the tutorial for more methods.

3. Update or Roll back the Touchpad driver

Here we have two cases; first if the problem is caused by a recent update of the touchpad driver then we will roll back to the old driver. Second is, if the issue is due to old driver then we will update the touchpad driver. Let’s do these two things one by one and check for the result.

Update touchpad driver

• Open Control Panel
• Now set view by: Category
• Click on Hardware and Sound
• Go to Device Manager and then double click on Mice and other pointing devices
• Now right click on Touchpad device (mine is Lenovo pointing device, yours can be Synaptics Pointing Device or any other brand) and click on Properties.
• In the new dialogue box, under Driver tab click on Update driver
• Now in the next dialogue box, select “Search automatically for updated driver software” (Recommended) or “Browse my computer for driver software” to manually install the driver.

The computer will now look for the updated driver on the internet if you have selected “Search automatically for updated driver software” or you can manually install if you have the updated driver.

Now let’s see how you can roll back to the old driver if the problem was caused due to recent update of touchpad driver.

You can also check the status of the device under General tab it should say “This device is working properly” below device status.

Roll back to the old driver

Follow the exact above steps and navigate to the driver tab (Follow above steps except the last point). Now under the driver tab and beneath the “Update driver” click on “Roll back driver”. Finally it will ask for the reason for your roll back, select anyone of the options and click Yes. Now check if your touchpad is working or not.

4. Remove extra mouse drivers

There is high probability that over a period of time you must have used several mice on your laptop. All these mice install their drivers to function and sometimes these drivers can interfere with the touchpad driver. So in this method we will remove unnecessary mice drivers.

• Open Control Panel
• Now set view by: Category
• Click on Hardware and Sound

• Go to Device Manager and then double click on Mice and other pointing devices.
• Right click on each mouse driver one by one and click uninstall driver.

This will remove all the external mice drivers and then check if the laptop touchpad is working or not.

5. Is your laptop touchscreen?

If you have a touchscreen laptop then there are chances that your laptop’s stylus feature is interfering with touchpad which is controlled by Tablet PC input service. Let’s try disabling the TabletInputService (stylus functionality) and see if the touchpad resumes in action or not.

Press Win (logo)+R key and type services.msc and hit Ok or you can also access this by opeing Windows task manager (Ctrl+alt+del) and check under the services for TabletInputSerivice (Scroll to last as the services are alphabetically sorted). Once you find the service right click on it and disable/stop the service. Now check if the touchpad is working or not. Follow the exact same steps to enable it.

We hope your touchpad starts working again. But even if it is not working after trying all the above mentioned methods then it is highly possible that your touchpad is defective at hardware level. In that case you need to take your laptop to the service center and they will tell you the exact reason.