How to disable touchpad when external mouse is plugged in

[redraeven]

System ID: 832A

Product ID: 1TJ81UA#ABA

Windows version 10.0.19041.508.

About 4-6 OS/driver updates ago, I used to be able to disable the touchpad when an external mouse was plugged in. I can no longer do that. There is no option to disable the touchpad under any mouse or touchpad settings, including advanced options. I want to be able to toggle between enabling and disabling the touchpad, not disable the touch pad completely. I've searched the support forums and the only advice offered was to disable the HID compliant pointing device under Device Manager -- not only that, but it stated that if disabling the first HID pointing device didn't work, you had to go through *each in turn* until you stumbled across the right device! NOT an efficient option and again, I DON'T want to permanently disable the device (not to mention, Windows would just re-enable it on next boot up!). Why on earth was the ability to do this taken away???

[emcee510]

Touchpad driver support is pretty lousy indeed! There may be a way to accomplish your goal through a registry tweak, maybe google for that? The only thing that I'd know how to do is to delete the touchpad in Device Manager and then install an old driver that has the feature that you need, and then you need to figure out how to prevent windows from updating that specific driver.