Maya let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She saved her thesis draft, ordered a backup wireless mouse on same-day delivery, and wrote a sticky note for her future self:

Windows whirred, thought for a moment, and then—like a miracle arriving on a dial-up connection—the ELAN Precision Touchpad reappeared in the list. No yellow triangle. The driver was freshly reinstalled from Windows’ own hidden cache.

She plugged in her phone’s charging cable—no, that didn’t work as a mouse. She sighed and opened the . Right-clicking the Start button felt like a secret handshake. Under Mice and other pointing devices , she saw it: ELAN Precision Touchpad . It had a small yellow warning triangle next to it.

First, she tried the obvious. She held down the Fn key and tapped F7 —the one with the little touchpad icon. The screen flashed an overlay: Touchpad: Disabled. A surge of hope. She tapped it again. Touchpad: Enabled. She swiped. The cursor remained frozen, a smug statue.

The screen flickered. The touchpad went completely dark—no haptic feedback, no lights. For a terrifying second, she thought she’d bricked the thing. Then, she clicked the menu at the top of Device Manager and selected Scan for hardware changes .