How Can I Programmatically Enable or Disable Devices in Win32, Especially Problematic Ones Like Touchpads?

Programmatically Enabling/Disabling Devices in Win32: Challenges and Solutions

While you can typically disable devices from the device manager, not all devices are "disable-able" through this method. Specifically, the default mouse driver in most laptops with a touchpad ("PS/2 compatible mouse") cannot be disabled using SetupDi APIs.

Solution:

If you're unable to disable your touchpad through the device manager or via the SetupDi APIs, you may need to explore other approaches, such as writing a filter driver that accepts IOCTLs to enable and disable mouse event messages. Alternatively, you could utilize a raw PDO to communicate with user mode.

Note:

When attempting to disable devices programmatically, it's important to verify that the device can actually be disabled. This can be done by checking if the disable option is available in the device manager. If the disable option is not present, you will likely encounter errors using SetupDi or other API calls to disable the device.

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