I bought my Inspiron B130 about a year and a half ago.  Within a week of purchasing it I concluded that I hate touch pads and wanted to go back to the comfort of a mouse.  I purashed a Microsoft Wireless optical mouse that you connect to the laptop via a USB thumb drive-like thing.

After installing it, I was very happy to learn that I could go into the properties for the touch pad (Synaptics PS/2 Port Pointing Device) and choose between three options in a drop down window: engage, disengage, or disengage when other pointing device is present.  In other words, there was an option to turn off the touchpad when I'm using the wireless mouse.  That made me soooo happy.  One of the reasons I hate the touch pad is that my plams frequently accidentally brush it while I'm trying, which results in the cursor moving to a differently part of the page, which means I'm adding text in the wrong spot.  So I turned it off and never looked back.

However, beging last nigh I noticed that my cursor was magically jumping around the screen.  A quick investiagtion showed that the touchpad is once agian activite and reacting to inadvertant brushes of my plams.  I figured, "No big deal.  The settings must have somehow been changed.  I'll go back in a disengage the touch pad again."  But that's where the real problem starts...

I go into control panels>hardware>mouse and pull up the properties.  I get a warning that the Synaptics driver cannot be found.  I'm still able to click in and find the properties for the touchpad.  There's a drop down menu label Device Usage (I'm pretty sure this is where I would choose to engage, disengage, or disgenage when other device is present).  However, the drop down menu is blank and frozen.  It's given me no options at all.

I thought perhaps that warning about a missing driver could be causing it (but if the drive is completely missing, would the touch pad stop working all together?).  Anyway, treid to search for the driver, but it can't be found on my system.  Is it something I could find online?  Is it something that would be on one of the installation disks I got from Dell?

And more importantly, do you think reinstalling the driver will once again give me the ability to disengage my touch pad?  Or is there another approach I could try?

Thanks.