Asus laptop touchpad on/off issue

Osem · 05-05-2015, 13:17

I have an Asus X550c with touchscreen which has been upgraded to W8.1.

I've noticed that the Fn + F9 command to disable the touchpad doesn't seem to work properly. I like to keep it set to disabled but sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. On booting up the machine, it takes several minutes for the touchpad to be disabled automatically and sometimes it doesn't seem to happen at all and even clicking fn F9 has no effect.

If I go into Control Panel and click on 'Mouse' then the 'Hardware' tab, the mouse and touchpad are listed. Clicking on 'Asus touchpad' opens another box labelled 'Asus Touchpad Properties' which contains a 'change settings' button on the bottom. Clicking this seems to do nothing and just reopens the same box.

It's very annoying and I'm wondering why it's happening and how to fix it. Can anyone advise please?

TIA as always.

Mick Fisher · 05-05-2015, 17:45

I have an old asus lappie and the touchpad has always been unusable. It's disabled in control panel/mouse/touchpad settings but it only takes effect if it finds a mouse connected.

Osem · 05-05-2015, 21:55

I have a USB mouse connected all the time. Having tried a few things I've found that if I leave the machine to boot up and settle down for a few minutes before doing anything, the touch-pad locks and can be enabled/disabled via fn + F9. Odd eh?

qasdfdsaq · 06-05-2015, 10:28

It's probably taking a while to start up, most laptops depend on a third party utility that loads after you log in to enable Fn buttons.

Osem · 06-05-2015, 11:46

That makes sense. Maybe what's happening is that if I start tapping away too soon, the utlity doesn't work properly. That's what's happened this morning. I'm going to reboot now, leave the PC alone for 5 mins then see what happens. TVM.

Osem · 29-07-2015, 11:07

Just an update on this for anyone else who may be having a similar issue. The problem has remained intermittent over the last few months with the fn+f9 toggle being mostly ineffective. Anyway I just did some more searching and found a reference to Asus Smart Gesture software which I found an icon for in 'control panel'. On opening this I found the option to disable the trackpad when a mouse is connected and selecting that and rebooting seems to have solved the problem for now.

Osem · 11-12-2015, 09:14

Hmmm..... The problem persists and it's damned annoying. Fiddling with the settings via the SmartGesture interface rarely seems to do the trick for any length of time.

Checking around online I found a reference to using the 'repair' option via: "control panel/programs & features" and right clicking on the programme. I am, as usual, a little reluctant to do this without knowing what might be involved in any 'repair' and what sort of problems might result however so could anyone explain what this will do?

I hate using the trackpad but obviously don't want anything to interfere with the use of my mouse or the laptop's touchscreen.

TIA as always.