I wanted to post a tip about touch pads on laptops. The particular brand is not important. I'm a retired electronic engineer who spent over 40 years working on with computers, fixing computers and teaching computer science. I have an HP laptop and it has a touch pad like almost all laptops do. I have taken up writing stories which I may or may not publish to the Web. I have been using Word Perfect in various versions for about 30 years and am too set in my ways to use a different word processor. I don't really like touch pads so I use a mouse most of the time. I'm old school. I do bite the bullet and use the touch pad when I'm not at my desk and it is inconvenient to use the mouse.
When I am writing at my desk, sometimes the cursor will disappear to parts unknown. I discovered that this is caused by my inadvertent touching the touch pad and dragging the cursor. The result is I put new characters into places they don't belong. Touch pads work by sensing a change in the electric field on the surface of the pad caused by a finger. To make my touch pad stop sensing my inadvertent touches, I took two 3x5 index cards and placed a piece of aluminum foil cut to fit between the index cards. I used some tape to bind the assembly together. The index cards were slightly bigger than the touch pad so they covered it completely. I taped the cards to the deck. The aluminum foil shields the touch pad from my finger or thumb. As a result the cursor doesn't jump around if I brush against the touch pad. If I want to use the touch pad, I just peel the index cards off.
I wrote this as a suggestion to anyone who has experienced something similar. Of course I could have gone into Device Manager and disabled the touch pad. There is always the possibility that reenabling the touch pad doesn't work. I've had that kind of problem with Windows before.
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