Clicking and Pointing on a Touchpad
Two common types of built-in laptop hardware serve the same purpose as a separate, moveable mouse or trackball:
- Touchpad: A pressure-sensitive rectangle that sits in front of the spacebar. The onscreen insertion point or selection point moves in response to the movement of your finger on the pad: up, down, left, or right. The touchpad is, obviously, much smaller than the full LCD screen; this may mean that you have to slide your finger across the pad several times to get to the top or bottom, left or right of the image. Figure 1 shows a typical touchpad.
- Stick or pointer: Usually embedded in the keyboard and extending slightly above the height of surrounding keys. Software interprets the push of your finger (and the amount of pressure applied) to move the cursor at varying rates of speed.
Under both designs - touchpad and stick - you also find a pair of action buttons nearby. The buttons are the equivalent of the left or right mouse buttons and are used to issue commands, make selections, or call up context-sensitive menus. Most touchpad designs also permit an alternate means of communicating the pressing of a mouse button; a double tap of the touchpad with the finger can be interpreted as a left mouse click.
Check out the Mouse Properties page, part of the Control Panel, to find out about available customization for the pointing device in your laptop. A touchpad’s advanced feature settings might allow you to assign specific tasks to the left or right buttons, as well as commands to taps made to any of the pad’s four corners. A few laptop models add a scroll wheel between the two action buttons.
One important feature worth choosing - if it’s not already part of the default settings for your laptop - is to enable snap-to functionality. When this feature’s turned on, the pointer automatically appears in the default button of any dialog box you come to. This allows quick navigation through common tasks with a series of clicks or taps.
Other designs include a small trackball (an upside-down mouse that lets you move the cursor by rotating a ball), an external mouse (either full-size or a downsized laptop version) that attaches to the USB or other port on the laptop, or a touch-sensitive or photoelectric sensor screen that reads finger movements and selections directly from the surface of a tablet or other specialized LCD.
Finally, you can add an external mouse or other form of pointing device by connecting it to the USB or (on some machines) to a special mouse port (called a PS/2 port). If you do that, you may want to disable the built-in touchpad or stick; most laptops let you do that through a Fn key combination or in the Mouse Properties screen.
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