Laptop not working - touchpad unresponsive

I spent this holiday season with my uncle. He belongs to the special group of people who, though, are very intelligent; simply hate to use computers. I was able to change his attitude a little a few months back, on an earlier visit, when I introduced him to the "power-of-the-internet". The amount of information available on the web impress him a lot... but he was sceptical of it too (like all wise people should be). I had also bought him a nice silver colored Lenovo laptop during that visit and made him walk the web-tightrope, as he likes to call it.

On this trip, after the pleasantries, we started talking about the web and his computer and he exclaimed - "the damn thing just doesn't work without a mouse".

"Why? What's wrong? And why do you use a mouse? The laptop has a touchpad", I said.

To cut the story short, my uncle complained the touchpad was completely unresponsive and had stopped working. He was now using the mouse that came free with the laptop. Though I was happy to know that his computer skills had improved (he had managed to attach the mouse and get it to work - remember he simply didn't know how to use a computer a few months back), I was feeling bad that the new laptop had a broken touchpad.

Why don't you take it to the repair center tomorrow?", he suggested. The repair center would have cost me half a day - I was on holiday - so I thought I would take a look at this first.

It took me only a minute to diagnose what was wrong - why the touchpad on his laptop was not working.

Most laptops (if not all) come with a function key. You'll find one near the bottom left. The function key is labelled "Fn" and usually stands out from the rest - either the "Fn" is in a different color or the key as a whole. The function key works in conjunction with other keys on the keyboard especially the ones in the top row marked "F1" to "F12". The combination of function key with these keys lets you perform various tasks quickly such as shutting the screen, putting the computer in sleep mode, switching the wireless connection on and off etc.

By keeping the function key pressed and then hitting one of the keys ("F1" to "F12"), activates a task. Thus, on my uncle's Lenovo laptop (and I've noticed this on HP and Toshiba systems too), you can activate and deactivate the touchpad by using the function key with the "F8" key.

So if the touchpad on your laptop is not working and is unresponsive, it's not broken, you or someone else has accidently deactivated it with the function key.