In the very old days when laptops were very expensive and were only used by the business executives, the laptops did not have any touchpad. In fact, they used to come with a pointer stick in the middle of keyboard. You could move the mouse pointer by tilting this small stick in any direction. But now all of the modern notebook computers come with a touchpad. While touchpads have certainly made it very easy to control the mouse pointer and have enhances the computing experience through the use of gestures, they could interfere when you are busy typing a document in your favorite Office application.
When you are typing, your thumbs or your palms may inadvertently brush on the touchpad making it move the mouse pointer or even worse, clicking on something on your screen. This make the mouse pointer jump across the screen and consequently the cursor in the document you are typing also changes position. One way to prevent this is to disable the touchpad as you start typing a lengthy document. You can disable the touchpad yourself manually using the Windows settings, but a much more convenient way is to use a free program called Touchpad Pal.
Touchpad Pal is a very small program with just one goal – to disable the touchpad in your notebook computer when you start using your keyboard. It places an icon in the notification area of Windows desktop that changes to indicate that touchpad has been disabled or is enabled. If you have attached an external mouse whether through USB cable, through Bluetooth or WiFi, then it will have no effect on the touchpad.
You can select Show/Hide option from the right-click menu of the notification area icon to view the Touchpad Pal window but there are no options available in the free version. You can only view the number of accidental clicks that this software has prevented.
Verdict: Touchpad Pal could be a life saver if you are using your laptop to type a lot and are troubled with the incessant accidental clicks caused by the slight brushing of your palms against the touchpad. Even though originally designed to work with Windows 7, it works on Windows 8.x and Windows 10 too.
You can download Touchpad Pal from http://tpp.desofto.com/.