Turn off the pointing stick on a Dell E4310

I have a Dell E4310 as my work laptop at the moment and have been very pleased with it. The only niggle I have is that when I’m typing the cursor often randomly jumps back to the middle of a previous sentence.

The cause- my fat fingers are inadvertently catching the pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard- as I don’t use it (I use the touchpad or an external mouse) I needed to turn off.

My laptop has our standard “corporate” image on it and I was struggling to find a way to switch off the device so I could type without fear of the cursor leaping into a different paragraph (or even application) mid sentence. Nothing in Control Panel or the BIOS mentioned the pointing stick at all. It turns out I needed to install the Dell driver for the touchpad/pointing stick (“Dell Multi-Touch Touchpad”) which comes with a nice little app to do just that.

If anyone else has this issue, the driver can be downloaded from the Dell website (under Drivers and Downloads in the Support section).