You can probably skip reading this article if you are using a very old laptop with a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard. All modern laptop comes with a touchpad replacing the old trackpoint which is meant to move the mouse cursor much easier and more accurately. The designers of touchpad did a great job inventing it but the programmers still need to improve on the software because for some weird reason they’ve either never though of fast typing on a laptop’s keyboard can be a problem when you accidentally placed your hand on the touchpad causing the cursor to jump to another paragraph or they simply ignored it.
Most of the time I type on my external keyboard which is connected to the laptop so that I wouldn’t stress my shoulder but if I had to bring out my laptop, my palm always ended up touching the touchpad when I type on the laptop’s keyboard. I guess this is normal since I am not used to the normal keyboard and my external keyboard is the split type. I have been using TouchFreeze that is able to automatically disable the touchpad when typing but I found a newer one called Touchpad Blocker.
Basically both TouchFreeze and Touchpad Blocker are created to solve the problem of preventing the mouse cursor from jumping when typing on notebook but they work differently. TouchFreeze totally disables the touchpad during typing but Touchpad Blocker only blocks the clicks during typing which is enough to prevent cursor from involuntary jumping.
If you have been using TouchFreeze, I would suggest you to switch to Touchpad Blocker because of a few reasons:
1. Touchpad Blocker is up to date while TouchFreeze has not been updated for 4 years already. Seems to be a dead project…
2. Touchpad Blocker has options to set the threshold in blocking accidental taps and clicks, and also to set your own favorite hotkey to enable or disable the blocking. TouchFreeze settings are fixed as there are no options.
3. Touchpad Blocker only block the taps (even tells you how many clicks it has blocked) and clicks which is enough to solve the annoyance of accidental jumping to another paragraph. Don’t really need to disable the entire touchpad. Do note that the mouse clicks that comes from the physical mouse are also blocked during typing.
4. Touchpad Blocker works perfectly on Windows 7 while TouchFreeze sometimes just fail to work and require to restart the program.
Touchpad Blocker is free and works with any 32 or 64 bit version Windows. I find that such software is a must to install on a laptop or notebook. What do you think?
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