The Cool Utility of the Day: TouchFreeze (Automatic disable/enable of your touchpad when typing, or not)

Addictive Tips - Auto Disable Mouse Touchpad When Typing

“It is a common annoyances with netbooks and laptops which lack the disable touchpad button. Most blogs out there are covering a single method to disable the touchpad, i.e, go to Control Panel > Mouse Properties and then disable the touchpad from there.

The above method is not suitable for those who need to disable the touchpad frequently for short periods of time. Who in his/her right mind would navigate back and forth just to enable/disable touchpad? This could be quite a hectic process.

TouchFreeze is a brilliant little app that solves this problem. It disables the touchpad temporarily the moment a keystroke is pressed. In layman’s term, it disables the touchpad automatically when you are typing and enables it back when the typing is stopped.

It will sit silently in the system tray without disturbing any of your work. Just start typing and don’t worry about the touchpad any more.

…”

Code.Google.com – touchfreeze

“Annoyed when you are typing a document and accidentally the palm of your hand brushes the touchpad, changing the position of the cursor in your document or accidentally clicking on an option. TouchFreeze is simple utility for Windows NT/2000/XP that solves this problem. It automatically disables touchpad while you are typing text. Like syndaemon on x-windows.

…”

I SO need this! I usually disable touchpads and prefer to use the J/Keyboard mouse, but on my new PDC Acer that’s not an option. And I don’t want to carry around an external mouse (nor do I have a BlueTooth mouse yet, so am on USB dongle hell with my external mouse).

So I’ve been coming to terms with the touchpad.

Yet there was a behavior that was making me crazy. As I would type, my cursor would seem to magically jump elsewhere, which of course I wouldn’t notice until a few words later… As I analyzed my type behavior I came to realize that my thumb was tapping the touchpad as I typed. Ah ha! Off with the thumbs!… errr… um… okay… maybe not. But it does seem some retraining was in order or putting a possibly installing and unsupported touchpad driver. Neither option is one I liked.

Then I saw TouchFreeze. ZOMG, that’s it! Perfect!

I’ve installed it (Win7 Ultimate x64) and it seems to be working exactly as I need it too! (And is a open source C++ app too :)

I am now a happy, touchpad using, camper