The cursor and the PC take gone hand in hand for decades, and so when the old stops working it tin can be incredibly frustrating.

Unless you have an external mouse on hand, it restricts navigating around your PC to keyboard shortcuts. Having a touchscreen device might help the situation, but avoiding cursor-based navigation is oftentimes far from intuitive.

This is one issue where the archetype 'plough it off and on again' isn't likely to help.  Y'all'll instead need to find a way of re-enabling the trackpad, which is annoyingly easy to disable unintentionally.

Nearly laptops let you do this in some way, whether it'south using a dedicated push button, key combination or through the BIOS. In this commodity, we'll run through these three potential solutions.

Look for a Touchpad switch on the keyboard

The first matter to do is cheque for any push button on your keyboard which has an icon that looks like a touchpad with a line through information technology. Press it and run into if the cursor starts moving once more.

If non, check your row of function keys at the top of the keyboard. Many will take icons and then once again await for one that could exist a trackpad – typically F7, simply nosotros've also seen laptops that use F5 and F9.

How to fix stuck cursor on laptop

Pressing this central alone is unlikely to work, although information technology has been known to on certain devices. In most cases, you'll need to press and hold the Fn key and then press the relevant function primal to bring your cursor back to life.

Check your Windows settings

To cheque if your trackpad has been disabled in Windows, click the Start button, type 'mouse' in the search field, and then select Mouse (or Mouse settings) from the search results.

In Windows 10, but type straight into the search box on the Taskbar.

In the window that appears, click 'Additional mouse settings' nether 'Related settings'

The Mouse Backdrop screen should now come up. Click the 'Hardware' tab and ensure the touchpad is highlighted. Then select 'Properties' above the OK push and another window will open.

Now, nether the 'General' tab, cull 'Change settings', where you might have to enter your login password.

Information technology might not look similar anything has happened, but under the 'Driver' tab there should at present be an pick to 'Enable Device'. If you only see 'Disable Device', effort clicking that an and so re-enabling in one case more.

It'southward a more complicated procedure on Windows 10 than in previous versions, but the menus y'all go through should look something similar below:

LED on touchpad?

Some HP laptops have an LED in the peak-left corner. If yours is lit, it ways the touchpad is disabled. Merely tap twice on (a quick double-tap) to re-enable the pad.

With the help of these steps, hopefully the problem is now solved. Got issues with your keyboard? Check out our guide on how to fix a laptop keyboard.