If your touchpad isn’t working on your laptop, you’re going to have to rely on your mouse. But there are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot a touchpad not working in Windows that may just fix the problem.

What to do:

Step one

• Right click on the Windows icon and then go to Device manager.
• Look for the option Mice and other pointing devices. Double click on it to reveal the devices listed below it.
• Now right click on each device one by one and select Update driver. Then select Search automatically for drivers.

Step two

• Now click on Human Interface Devices. Look for a device that says touchpad. Once you find it, right click and choose Update driver, then search automatically for drivers.

Step three

• If step one and step two work — great. If they don’t, click again on the touchpad under Human Interface Devices and select Update drivers. This time select Browse my computer and select Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer. Then select your model touchpad from the list and click Next.

Step four

• If the above steps don’t work, there’s one more thing you can try. Under Human Interface Devices, right click on touchpad and then select uninstall device. Then on the top menu go to Action and select Scan for hardware changes and your touchpad driver will be installed again.

Hopefully that’s resolved the problem, and your touchpad is now working again. Make sure you restart your PC after making these changes though.

That’s a wrap for this edition of Try This. For more helpful tips be sure to subscribe to PCWorld’s Try This newsletter.

Author: Dominic Bayley, Australian Editor, PCWorld