Don't let a touchy touchpad ruin your opinion of a laptop that's otherwise in fine working order. You can extend the life of your laptop with a few, simple tweaks to its touchpad. Whether your touchpad is dead to the touch or is acting skittish -- registering unintended gestures while failing to recognize your intended swipes, pinches, taps and clicks --  Windows 10 ($ at Amazon) offers a host of settings to let you get working the way you want. 

I'll start with how to revive a dead touchpad and then cover the various settings you can use to tweak its sensitivity, gestures and scrolling direction. And if you'd like more tips, here's how to master Windows 10 using 11 hidden tricks. This story updates periodically.

Revive a dead touchpad

If your laptop doesn't feature a touchscreen display, then you will need a mouse to revive a disabled touchpad. With your touchscreen or mouse, open Settings and go to Devices >Touchpad and make sure the toggle switch at the top is toggled On. 

If your touchpad is dead and your laptop doesn't have a touchscreen and you don't have a mouse within reach, you can try to to find the function key that might enable and disable the touchpad. My Dell Inspiron laptop doesn't have function key for such a purpose, but look at your row of Function keys and see if one has an icon that looks a tiny touchpad with a diagonal line through it. Try toggling this key (while pressing the Fn key or, if that doesn't work, not pressing it) to see if your touchpad springs back to life. If not, then you'll need to find a mouse and go into Settings to toggle on the touchpad.

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Settle down a skittish touchpad

There are a number of ways a touchpad can feel wonky. Perhaps your cursor is moving too fast or too slow. Maybe the touchpad feels too sensitive, registering phantom clicks and gestures. Or maybe it's not sensitive enough, making you repeat yourself. Thankfully, Windows 10 offers a number of settings to fine tune how your touchpad reacts to your clicks, taps and swipes.

Head to Settings > Devices > Touchpad and you'll see a slider near the top labeled Change the cursor speed. Play around with the slideruntil you find a speed you can work with.