Does the touchpad on your Toshiba laptop freeze?

Mine did a couple of weeks ago. Solving it was easy. However, I needed a mouse to reset it.

What had happened was that somehow the control panel setting for mouse movement was being reset (turned off) at the point of booting up.

What I did – got a small USB mouse after booting up.
Go to control panel
Go to Mouse
That opens a popup with Mouse Properties
(your Toshiba is probably a different model than my Toshiba)
but there was a box there that said “disable touchpad” and it was checked.

Uncheck it, save, and you are done

This happened to me right after the last set of Microsoft updates, so something in that sequence screwed things up.

@elbanditoroso This is great advice – I had done this for about four months and it worked like a charm. But now it won’t even acknowledge when a mouse is plugged in, it is the strangest thing. There was a Windows/Microsoft update right before it happened. I wonder if that could be part of the problem. Thanks!

@StaceyD – the only other advice I would have is to go to Control Panel – device manager – and DELETE (not just disable) the MOUSE (or pointing device) entry.

THen push the off button, and do a cold boot. The PC should detect new hardware (the touchpad would be seen as a new device) and do its thing…

@elbanditoroso I appreciate your help. I had done this a few times and it worked well. But now it will just show the popup for the mouse – that it exists -but with no other tabs to delete, disable, etc. It is really odd. The tech at Best Buy wanted me to leave the laptop but the costs can add up fast so I decided against it. This problem has become so frustrating and happens at the worst possible times.

Is there an update available for the Synaptics touchpad driver?

It doesn’t sound like a hardware issue – the Windows update seems too coincidental for that. However, if it’s stopped recognising USB mice, there could be some kind of low-level problem.

Windows updates often create a restore point before doing their thing. Perhaps you could roll back the update and install them manually, taking care to Google all of them and isolate the update that causes the issue. Then you deselect that update and never install it.

For the sake of thoroughness – and to definitively demonstrate a software issue – you could try a live instance of Linux on a USB stick. That would allow you to try a totally different kernel and driver stack with unrelated code. If you have a probledm then, it’s definitely hardware. If there’s no problem, it’s definitely software.