How to disable/turn off touchpad Chromebook

If you use your Chromebook as a daily computer and don’t need the use of touchpad capabilities, you can disable or turn off the feature.  You can also re-enable the Chromebook touchpad as you need.

Why would you disable or turn off the touchpad on your Chromebook?

Perhaps you prefer to use a mouse connected via USB or Bluetooth, or you want more control over the on-screen cursor and actions needed while using your Chromebook, as a mouse allows for a higher level of dexterity and accuracy.

Maybe you just need to clean the touchpad? It is, after all, advised that you disable the touchpad whenever you need to do more than just give it a quick wipe down.

How Do I Disable My Chromebook Touchpad?

The first thing you’ll want to do is navigate to the lower right-hand side of your Chromebook.  Then, follow these steps:

1. Click on your profile picture to get to your Chromebook’s settings.
2. Next, click on Settings. If necessary, scroll down to where it says “Device.”  Here, you can adjust touchpad settings or disable “tap to click.”
3. Click Touchpad and mouse settings. This opens the settings window.  Now, you can adjust the way the touchpad and mouse interact with your Chromebook.
4. Uncheck the box under “touchpad” where it says “enable tap to click.”

Originally, you could disable the touchpad on a Chromebook completely, but recent Chromebook updates removed the ability to do so. You can’t even use the input control command in Crosh to adjust the advanced touchpad and mouse settings anymore.

On the plus side, turning off “tap to click” means you won’t need to worry about clicking things every time you accidentally brush the touchpad, and you don’t need to worry about digging a five-year-old mouse out of storage the next time you accidentally drop soup!

If the above suggestions don’t work for your brand of Chromebook, Marcel (registered user of Tech Junkie) suggested that you try enabling ash-debug-shortcuts in Chrome Flags. The process enables additional keyboard shortcuts to help with debugging, but they also work to disable Chromebook touchpad functionality.

1. Type the following code in the browser address bar: chrome://flags/#ash-debug-shortcuts
2. Select Enable
3. Restart Chromebook
4. Press Search + Shift + P to disable/enable the touchpad

Thanks for the tip Marcel!

If all else fails, try factory resetting your Chromebook.

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