Originally Posted by
CrazyOne
I've never had that trouble with many touchpads. The trick, IMO, is to disable tapping (clicking) on the pad and always use the hardware button(s). That way there is no inadvertent clicking in the wrong place going on.
That said, it should be easy enough to disable the pad entirely if that's what you prefer. Personally, I've never been able to get used to pointing sticks, so I am appreciative of the designs that offer the choice of the touchpad.
Me too. The trick is in customizing all the settings. I don't disable tapping, I use it all the time, especially for dragging, but there is a setting to disable tapping when typing and that's an important one to enable. Different touchpad manufactures use different names for this feature, but they all have it. You can also set finger pressure, tapping pressure, acceleration, what happens at the edges and scrolling zones in both planes, and if you play with these things, you'll find the right settings that work well for you.
If the laptop has an Alps touchpad, the Alps drivers are very good and offer a ton of customization that makes working with a touchpad a breeze. Though I've seen some really low end laptops that somehow hide the touchpad from the OS, and in that case, there's no driver and therefore very little that can be customized. Since the Lattitudes aren't low end notebooks, I would hope that they don't do that.
I've never been able to successfully use a pointing stick, but I imagine it's just a matter of getting used to it as with the touchpad.
-David