When your thumb or palm accidentally grazes a laptop's touchpad, cursor can jump, resulting in garbled text or even an unwanted mouse-click. Fortunately, there are ways to combat this problem, usually by tweaking Windows' mouse/touchpad settings. If those options aren't available on your system or you're still not getting the results you want, try Touchfreeze. This open source utility serves one simple purpose: to disable your laptop's touchpad while you type.
Actually, Touchfreeze disables touchpad tapping, which is what causes the aforementioned problems. (It doesn't matter if your cursor moves while you're typing, as long as that movement isn't followed by a tap--the touchpad equivalent of clicking a mouse.)
I tested the utility on two laptops, one running Windows XP, the other, Vista. On both systems it worked as advertised: No amount of tapping while typing actually registered a tap.
If you've been tearing your hair out due to flaky laptop behavior, Touchfreeze may just solve the problem.
--Rick Broida
Reviewed by: Skipapa
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