How to disable touchpad?

How to disable touchpad?

I have an XP system with a PS/2 Cirque touchpad.
The windows driver puts the touchpad into some
non-standard protocol. The only way to get it
back to the standard protocol is to crawl around
behind the PC and pull the power plug...or the mouse plug.

I have myself convinced that booting a live linux
CD is more secure for online banking.

I use Puppy Linux because it lets me save the configuration
information back to the CDRW.

Problem is the non-standard mouse protocol. Touching
the touchpad sets off a flurry of windows opening and/or
closing. It often closes the X-session or shuts down
completely. Random input is NOT what you want when you're
doing financial transactions.

I added a wireless USB mouse that works fine.
Problem is that 20 years of habit is hard to break.
I find myself grabbing the touchpad and all hell
breaks loose. It's glued in place in front of the keybord,
so moving it out of harm's way is not an option.

Is there a way to disable the touchpad and keep
the USB mouse working when I boot the live CD?
The hardware is autodetected, so I think I'll need
a script to disable it after the system boots????
Puppy should let me do that???
I have no idea what I'm doing.

Google found me a couple of threads with similar
problems, some suggestions, but none of the
suggestions seemed to work for the people with the problem.

Suggestions?
Thanks, mike
.

Relevant Pages

  • Multiple mice setup?
    ... I have a notebook that I use the touchpad when mobile (Protocol "PS/2") ... I'm sure I can script something to swap out XF86Config file when booting ...
    (comp.os.linux.x)
  • gpm setup for two mice and x
    ... How do I set up gpm to use two mice with different protocols and get it ... I have a touchpad which acts as a serial mouse (autops2 seems to work ... Under the console with the autops2 protocol I don't get the third button ...
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  • Re: Mouse issues in -mm
    ... I believe this issue may also be related to the mouse protocol ... So the resync patch - is it only tapping that is broken or you also ... even with the resync patch (though the touchpad is unusably ... send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in ...
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  • Re: Touchpad problems with latest kernels
    ... I just got a HP dv8301nr laptop and found out about this problem. ... running kernel 2.6.17-debian and 2.6.17-ck1. ... The Touchpad is a model: ... no pointer freezes as with the SynPS protocol, ...
    (Linux-Kernel)