You’re working away on your laptop, engrossed in your work and typing at speed.

And all is well, until you accidentally touch a trackpad mouse button, the cursor jumps somewhere else entirely, and you have to pause to try and undo the damage. It’s frustrating, especially when it keeps happening, but you don’t have to live with this – Touchpad Blocker can help.

Once installed and launched, the program runs in the background, monitoring your keyboard. And every time you press a key, it disables the trackpad mouse buttons for half a second, so if you accidentally tap one then it’ll have no effect.

If you’re not the fastest of typists then you might find this default half second delay isn’t enough, but it can be altered from the settings dialog to whatever you like. A longer delay will reduce the chance of accidents, but also means you’ll have to wait for longer after typing before you can use the mouse buttons again, so it’s really a matter of experimenting to see what works best for you.

In our tests Touchpad Blocker worked well with applications that can involve lots of heavy typing, like word processors. But at other times – if you’re playing a game, say, or running anything else that requires a combination of rapid mouse clicks and key presses – then it can get in the way. There’s a customisable hotkey to toggle the blocking effect on and off, but if you forget about this and launch a game anyway then it’ll be annoying when you realise your mistake.

Still, if you’re regularly annoyed by accidental trackpad clicks interfering with your typing then Touchpad Blocker can be an effective solution: it’s lightweight (1.3MB RAM, private working set), configurable, free for personal and commercial use – and definitely worth a try.