Question: I own a Dell Inspiron N5050 Notebook running Windows 7 Home Premium. I am trying to permanently disable the touchpad. I installed the appropriate driver in order to manage my touchpad preferences, and successfully disabled it - but once the machine was rebooted, the touchpad was on again. I really don't care if I will need to keep disabling it each time I boot up, but does anyone know of a way to permanently disable it?

Answer: 
You don't really have to disable the entire touch pad, you just have to turn off the tap to select feature. Go to Control Panel>Mouse and select the touch pad tab. Find the tap-to-select tab, uncheck the enable box, and click OK.
Then, just touching the pad will have no effect, but it will still respond to a moving finger. And the change is permanent.
For a simple, ugly, non-technical option, you could just cover the touchpad with tape.