all laptops have touchpads in place of a USB mouse. The trouble is, some are very sensitive and an accidental brush with your palm as you’re typing and send the cursor flying to a different place on the screen.

For this reason, a lot of laptops let you disable the touchpad, whether using a dedicated button, key combination or through the BIOS.

It’s a little too easy to accidentally hit that button and wonder why your cursor is stuck and won’t move. If you have cats, there’s also a good chance it will stand on exactly the right keys to turn off the trackpad without you realising.

When this happens, restarting your laptop won’t help. Instead, you’ll need to find the button or function key combination that will re-enable the trackpad. It’s also possible that someone else has disabled the trackpad via Windows.

Here we’ll explain how to enable it again

Keyboard

The first thing to do is check for any button on your keyboard which has an icon that looks like a touchpad with a line through it. Press it and see if the cursor starts moving again.

If not, check your row of function keys at the top of the keyboard. Many will have icons so again look for one that could be a trackpad – typically F7, but we’ve also seen laptops that use F5 and F9