Okay, I'm going to try to be as thorough as possible on this. 5 days ago I received my brand new Inspiron 8600 notebook. I want to disable the pointing stick, simply because I am not used to it and am tired of having it messing around with me. No problem with it.. I just don't like it.

Now, the laptop came with the ALPS pointing stick/touchpad combo and there is NO place to disable either one of these things. I talked to Dell customer support who kept insisting that there should be a touchpad option under the Mouse option in the control panel. There is nothing there except for Buttons, Pointers, Pointer Options, and Hardware. I have gone through each selection carefully and clicked properties on whenever possible and there is NO option to disable the pointing stick.  So - no options in the control panel under mouse or keyboard.

I looked through some other messages about this issue on this board and saw a few people telling those with problems to go into the BIOS where you can supposedly disable the touchpad. Now, yes, you can supposedly disable the touchpad.. but I am not using an external mouse and I just want the pointing stick to leave me alone. So.. that's a no go. So - cannot be disabled in the BIOS.

Now, the last option I can think that would be suggested to me would be to update the drivers. The computer is all of *5* days old. There is no driver update for this mouse. Therefore, this is not an option. So - no new driver that can be installed.

Dell telephone customer support could not help me out with this issue at all. If anyone out there has any other suggestions besides the three listed above, I'd love a response. I'm willing to try whatever to get this little bugger to just stop working. Oh, and I also checked under the system hardware. Nothing under system hardware.

Thanks a ton. :)