Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I couldn't find any occurrence of a
touchpad under services.msc, so your suggestion didn't work. But I do have a
feeling that originally I may have disabled the touchpad by changing some
setting or other, so I feel your suggestion was on the right lines, even
though it didn't do the trick. Thanks once again for giving my problem some
thought.


"JerryM" wrote:

Something to try:

On the Start - Run line, type SERVICES.MSC and hit enter.
scroll down and look for touch pad,
If it is on the list, right click it and set it to automatic.

"rh0000" wrote in message
...
I have a Toshiba Satellite A100-033 running Vista Home Basic. I mostly use
the laptop as a desk top replacement and, as I dislike using the touchpad,
I
disabled it, and instead I use an external mouse via one of the USB ports.

On my laptop the standard way to disable the touchpad is by simultaneously
pressing the Fn key and the F9 key. However, to be honest, I am not sure
whether I did in fact disable the touchpad by this means, or whether I
used
some other means (if it was by some other means then I have forgotten what
this was). Recently I wished to re-enable the touchpad so that I could use
the laptop outside the house without having to take my external mouse with
me
as well. However, I found that pressing Fn + F9 did not re-enable the
touchpad and I now can't use the touchpad at all.

If I go into mouse properties (in control panel), this tells me that my
synaptics pointing device is enabled. If I go into device manager and look
at
"mice", I am told that my touchpad is working properly.

All this makes me suspect that the problem is not a hardware fault but
that
I have altered some setting, with the result that my touchpad is
permanently
disabled until I change the setting back to its original state.

Any suggestions?