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When using my Sony Vaio laptop, my mouse touchpad sometimes starts acting up. When on Ubuntu, I simply type these 2 commands in terminal to restart my mouse.

sudo modprobe -r psmouse

and

sudo modprobe psmouse

This solves the issue in Ubuntu. However, I couldn't find similar commands for Windows 10. My only resort is restarting Windows 10. I have tried updating the driver. It says that that my mouse driver is the latest driver. Fn key + Mouse disable/enable does nothing on Windows 10. However, Fn key + Mouse does work on Ubuntu.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

According to the laptop's manual, page 119, a restart is the only fix.
However, this appears to be Sony laziness -_-

Following the advice of this post,

Use the Devcon tool from Microsoft.

You can download Devcon here.
You can find documentation for Devcon here.

Commands to run:

  1. Find the driver class

    devcon classes

There will be a class listed that appears as "psmouse", "touchpad", "user interface device" or something similar.

  1. Using that class, search for the driver ID.

    devcon listclass "class name"

  2. Restart the driver.

     devcon restart "driver id"

The driver ID looks like HID\DLL06E4&COL01, i.e. a root ID and a device ID, with a \ in between. Note that the output from listclass shows additional data in the device line. You just want the first and second parts, separated by \. Don't include the second \ or anything after that.

After you know the driver ID, you only ever have to perform step 3. I would recommend placing step 3 in a .bat file and placing it on your desktop.

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  • To elaborate on my proposed edit: IMHO it's more useful to link to the product page, but in this case it's particularly important because the WDK version that was linked previously, is a version that broke UWP development in Visual Studio. The more recent releases correct this problem. Linking to the product page will ensure folks always have easy access to the most recent version.
    – Peter Duniho
    Commented Nov 24, 2017 at 19:57
  • The link now points to "Windows Driver Kit (WDK)" and the steps involve installing Visual Studio. Is this answer still relevant?
    – Qwerty
    Commented Jan 23, 2023 at 21:03
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I have had an intermittent problem with my touchpad since I bought my computer and wanted to restart the touchpad device without restarting the computer. I found that you can do this with pnputil, which is part of Windows, rather than using devcon, which requires a special download as part of a Visual Studio setup. From a command terminal, enter

pnputil /enum-devices

Search through the output for the "touchpad" device and note its "Instance ID". Then enter the command

pnputil /restart-device instanceID

where instanceID is the ID you found in the first step. The first step can be performed by any user but the second requires administrator privilege. I wrote a simple batch script using the gnu tools for Windows and the "clip" command line tool:

pnputil /enum-devices | grep -C1 "touch" | sed -n "1p" | sed "s#Instance ID: (.)#pnputil /restart-device "\1"#" | clip

This puts the pnputil command to restart the device driver into the clipboard. I almost always have a command window open anyway, so I just run this, and then open a second command window with administrator privilege, paste the command, problem solved.

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  • this looked neat, but it's not working for me. When touchpad is disconnected, command freezes the computer for 3-4 seconds, but does not make it work. Restarting it while it works, goes fine and instantly. Windows 10 pro. Only computer restart or hibernate;start solves it for me
    – jack
    Commented Sep 11, 2022 at 15:31

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