I purchased a laptop for my wife this past week (Ispiron 15 5548). Along with the purchase I got her a wireless mouse because she is more comfortable using a mouse rather than the touchpad. I have a fair bit of experience with Dell laptops, so I knew that the trackpad could be disabled automatically in the touchpad driver when a USB pointing device was detected. When I went to do this, I discovered that the Dell TouchPad driver wasn't installed. No problem, I downloaded it and installed it. Now the Dell Touchpad tab shows up under Mouse Properties, but if I click on it or on "Click to change Dell Touchpad settings"", I see the HDD LED become active for a few seconds and then nothing, no window opens, no error message, nothing.
I've tried to uninstall and re-install, install as Administrator, but nothing seems to fix this problem. I appears to me that this is a driver/software issue. Has anyone else run into this behavior? Like I said I've used Dell laptops at various jobs and never ran into this issue before.