In the early days of laptops, trackballs were an option. However, if you’ve ever owned a trackball for your desktop system, you know they require continued maintenance. Specifically, all the contact with your hand – no matter how clean that hand – eventually gunk up the innards of the trackball, thus requiring you to partly disassemble the trackball for a serious debunking.
Since disassembly of any part of their laptop is an undesirable proposition for most users, the industry eventually drifted away from trackballs.
Today, you have two choices in built-in pointing devices
1. The touchpad
2. The pointing stick.
The touchpad was originally pioneered in Apple laptops, but quickly caught on throughout the industry. The touchpad is exactly what is seems to be from its name: a pad that you touch. It’s rectangular in shape and its dimensions approximate the proportions of your laptop display. You simply rest your finger on the touchpad and drag it from one point to another to move te mouse on the display. Depending on how you configure your touchpad, you can also optionally tap on it to perform a left-click.
Effective use of a touchpad does take a little practice. However, with no moving parts, there’s little chance of any mechanical malfunction. Also, studies show that a touchpad is very desirable from an ergonomic standpoint.
The name pointing stick isn’t nearly as descriptive as touchpad. That may explain why many people have taken to calling these pointing devices eraser nubs. That’s exactly what they look like: the eraser on the end of a pencil, sticking up slightly from the middle of your keyboard.
To move your mouse pointer, you simply nudge the eraser nub in the appropriate direction. This, of course, takes some getting used to. Too hard a nudge can send your mouse pointer sailing across the screen. However, once you are familiar with its use, precision movements become easy and routine
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