I have a Dell Inspiron N7010 running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. I wanted to shut off my touchpad and use my mouse instead. The Dell documentation for my model says to hit the key to the right of the F12 key, but it also adds that this will only work if the Synaptics touchpad driver is installed, which it clearly wasn't.
So I tried installing the driver, but after extracting the files and trying to run the install, I got this message:
To install this application, the local security policy option "User Account Control -- Detect application installations and prompt for elevation" should be enabled.
So I tried these three things:
1. Googled the error message, but found the suggestions for running secpol.msc didn't work because secpol.msc doesn't exist.
2. Googled some more, and found that the suggestions for a registry hack didn't work either.
3. Tried running the install in elevated (administrator mode) but that didn't work either.
But then I tried this:
1. Locate the driver setup file setup.exe. For me, it was in C:\dell\drivers\R255591
2. Right click on the setup.exe and click on "troubleshoot compatibility"
3. Select "Try recommended settings"
4. The driver now successfully installs and my touchpad toggle key next to F12 works great