touchpad and track pointer frozen

When was the last time your touchpad was working? I think there maybe some driver conlict(s). If WINDOWS doesn't recognize the driver(s) after you reintalled it, you can try system restore.

I'm having a very similar problem with my Gen1 Inspiron XPS.

Everything was working fine yesterday (when I was, ironically, helping fix my friend's laptop). There was one random crash that occured while I was browsing music on winamp, but that's the only thing out of the ordinary that happened to my laptop yesterday.

Anyhow, I noticed today, just an hour or two ago that neither the touchpad nor stick were working. Additionally, about every ~3 seconds my computer would do a minor 'hiccup' and the mouse pointer would hang (I am/was using my BT Microsoft mouse) and winamp would pause momentarily.

I rebooted and upon restart noted that my keyboard was only registering every about 3rd keystroke. I was terrified something was horribly wrong with my hardware or something. I logged in (with great difficulty) and proceeded to uninstall the Alps touchpad drivers (which, upon me opening it up, did not acknowledge that I had either a touchpad or stick at all!). The hiccuping didn't seem to start until after I had originally opened up Alps to see if I could figure out why my integral pointing devices weren't working. I thought somehow Alps could be the culprit in my keyboard issues too.

I reboot again, sans Alps, and I have the exact same issue with the keyboard upon login. Windows detects the touchpad etc as a "P/S 2 compatible mouse" which is all well and good, except that neither are responding at all!

I try to reinstall using the download I already have of the latest Alps drivers (R113813), but there was some DLL it couldn't open, so I re-extract the drivers from the download I had, and then install seems to happen fine. I reboot, as requested.

Still have the keyboard issue and Alps now recognizes that my XPS has a touchpad (allowing me to choose to enable/disable the pad and it's buttons) but there's still no response at all with either pointing device, and Alps doesn't detect the stick at all.

I reboot into Safe Mode and the keyboard is all back to normal, no problems there. I uninstall the alps drivers and reboot into safe mode again, still no touchpad/stick. I roll back the drivers back to what I think are the default MS ones, and still no luck. I reboot normally and go and re-download the Alps drivers from the dell site and install them. I reboot and here I am. My keyboard is working fine ::knock on wood:: and the hiccup is gone. However, I still have no response from either built-in pointer and the Alps utility/MS Intellipoint still doesn't recognize that I have either. Next step for me will be to uninstall MS Intellipoint and reinstall the latest version there, and see if that helps.

Summary: Yea, my internal pointers (pad and stick) don't work either on my Inspiron Gen1 XPS

Please let me know if anyone figures out a cause!

(I'm running a non-dell branded version of WinXP Pro.)

Try to see if the device manager recognizes the driver for the mousepad of trackstick. If there's one in there, left click on it and choose uninstall. Reinstall it manually from the resource CD or download it from www.support.dell.com. Key in your service tag and choose download, choose the driver and save it to disk. I was also thinking that you may want to check if you have an updated version of anti-virus software. Issues like yours are most likely caused by  device drivers conflicts 70% of the time.

Tell me what you've got after reinstalling the device driver.

TIP: You can also use the driver rollback feature of the device manager instead of manual reinstallation. This feature is faster.

Update^2:

Everything's working great now!

I'm not sure exactly what I did that fixed thigns, but I pulled out the keyboard, reseated that connector along with the one for the touchpad (the pointing stick shares a connector with the keyboard) and then I rebooted (after cleaning out huge amounts of dust) and things seem to be going well; I installed Alps with no problem and I've re-configured the pad how I like it (enable scrolling but just real-narrow).

Just a note: DO NOT attempt to take apart your laptop unless you are confident in yourself and have some experience; there's a lot of delicate components and cables involved and there's a lot of damage to be done if you aren't careful!