I'm having a very serious problem where the touchpad is no longer usable (this laptop is only 1.5 years old!) because any slight touch of it causes the laptop to instantly fall asleep - screen goes black, lights go out on keypad, have to wake it up again pressing enter or power button.  I have never seen anything like this in my life and it started suddenly today.  I now have no choice but to use an external mouse.  

Rebooted multiple times - it did nothing. Tried updating driver uselessly in device manager, of course it says it's current.  Tried disabling the touchpad driver and installing Synaptic driver instead, installation fails. Tried finding another or newer driver to install from Dell - put in my serial number on Dell website and it returns a list of drivers with precisely ZERO of them being for a touchpad - so there is nothing. I can't even tell if this is a physical problem or a driver problem.  It seems way too weird to be purely physical.