20 August, 2011

Dell Latitude E6520 Notebook - Unable to Disable Tap-to-Click on Touchpad - Solved



My Dell Latitude E6520 (Windows7) did not have an option for me to disable 'Tap-to-click' on the Touchpad. The available options under the general mouse keypad had no such option included. I had seen similar issues, with other Dell laptop models, and in those cases a BIOS update had sometimes been called for, but in most cases that was like hitting a nail with a sledgehammer, so I figured there was probably an easier way to proceed, and there was.

1) I went to http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&cs=28&l=en&s=dfb&ServiceTag=&SystemID=LAT_E6520&os=W764&osl=en&catid=&impid= and downloaded and installed the DELL_MULTI-TOUCH-TOUCHPAD driver for Windows7 64-bit.

2) After restarting, the Dell Touchpad icon showed up, in my system tray, but it would not work without the .NET framework installed.

3) I went to Microsoft, got the latest v4 of .NET (client side), and installed it.

3) The Dell Touchpad control now functions and I was able to disable tap-to-click easily.




The addition of the 'Dell Touchpad' tab after installing the Dell update and .NET:



04 August, 2011

Thunderbird Tip - F and B Keys for True Forward and Backward

    Thunderbird, for some reason I don't understand, has no implementation of true Forward and Backward buttons.  The buttons they have only go to the next or previous UNREAD messages.  There are few to no add-on buttons for that either, for the current v5.0 version of Thunderbird.

    Instead of dealing with shoe-horning a v3 version of buttons into v5, I simply use the F (for forward) and B (for backward) buttons, while reading messages.  This works great and keeps the desktop clutter, and multiple clickings, to a minimum.