Thursday, January 23, 2014

Dell Latitude E6530 touchpad not working

Short short answer:  Press Fn + F5
Wow, it's been a looong time since I last posted.  I'm only posting now so I can search for this next time it happens.  So my touchpad stopped working all the sudden, I tried rebooting my laptop but still no dice.  Since I work from home, this was a huuuuge problem.  I went digging around for a wired mouse I used to have for my old PC.  Blasted thing had a serial port connector,  my laptop only has USB ports.  I dug around some more for a wireless mouse I bought a while ago that I know had a wireless USB dongle.  Found it.  Even though this was working, I decided to find out what the heck could have happened.  I was assuming I needed to reinstall  the driver.  I found the answer here:

http://www.helpowl.com/q/Dell/LatitudeE6530/Troubleshooting/touchpad-working-dell-latitude-e6530/334847

They have you try several things, but I'll summarize what worked for me.
I went to the Dell support link from the above post.  I found the link to Disable/enable the touchpad.
Honestly, I don't hardly use my Fn button and my keyboard doesn't look anything like the pictures on that support page.   But I did start hunting around my keyboard and found the icon under the F5 button:
 Somehow I must have hit the Fn button while I was refreshing my browser with the F5 button.  As a web application developer, I should have known this....but now I know.