Informer's World

Apple’s just opened up a new section of the App Store. Called “Try Before You Buy,” it lets users test drive a limited selection of apps before purchasing them.

Unfortunately, this trial period doesn’t apply to all the paid apps in the store — not yet, at least. For now, the section only contains the freemium, “lite” or ad-supported versions of apps whose full versions are in the pay-to-play section of the store. If the app doesn’t have a free version already in the App Store it won’t appear in Try Before You Buy.
You’ll still have to download and pay for the full versions of these apps if you want to test or try the real thing; most of the free or lite apps are pared-down versions with less extensive feature sets.
You can find this new section under the “Free on the App Store” heading. The section currently holds 98 apps, including the “lite” renditions games such as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown, Metal Gear Solid Touch and Labyrinth 2 and free adaptations of apps such as Moodagent and AccuTerra.

We’re not sure yet whether other paid apps will be added to this section for limited-time trials. But we’re fairly certain that a “try before you buy” policy might be an effective deterrent for would-be app pirates, the actions of whom have apparently cost the App Store around half a billion dollars. Many of the cracked or illegally shared apps were reportedly downloaded because the user didn’t have the option of making a truly informed purchase decision. They couldn’t use the apps, even for a brief test drive.
In addition to taking a bite out of piracy, we’re thinking the section was added to allow Apple’s smartphones to remain competitive (or at least to present the appearance of competition) with Android OS devices. The Android Market has a liberal returns policy; apps can be purchased and returned for a full and automatic refund for up to a day following purchase. And as we know, that competition is much needed as Apple moves into Q3 and Q4 this year.
What do you think of Try It Before You Buy It? Shameless ploy, or interesting opportunity? We welcome your opinions and thoughts in the comments section.

The touchpad provides full mouse functionality to your laptop but there are instances when you may actually feel more productive without the touchpad.
For instance, if you have attached an external mouse to your laptop, you may not need an alternate input mechanism which is the built-in touchpad.
Sometimes your thumbs or palm may accidentally touch the touchpad while you’re typing and this may inadvertently move your mouse cursor to a different location in the document. If you were not looking at your screen when the pointer jumped, you may end up typing at the wrong place.

How to Turn off the Touch Pad

To avoid running into such situations, it may not be a bad to disable the touchpad at least during the time when you are using a mouse or are typing a long document.
Some laptops don’t have dedicated buttons but you can use Function keys (like Fn + F5 on Dell computers) to toggle the state of your touch pad. In the case of HP laptops, you can hold the top-left corner of the touchpad for few seconds and it will disable the touch pad – repeat this to re-activate it.
New laptop computers either have a physical on/off button to easily disable the touch pad or there’s an icon in the system tray that lets you manage the various settings of the touchpad. If you don’t have that icon, you can go to Control Panel –> Mouse Properties –> Touch Pad to enable or disable the touchpad.
The touch pad can also be disabled through the device manager. Type devmgmt.msc in the Windows Run box to start the device manager, expand “Mice and other Pointing devices”, right-click and disable the driver entry that says Touch pad or likewise.
If none of the above solutions work for your brand of laptop, try TouchPad Pal – it’s a free Windows utility that will temporarily disable the touchpad of your laptop as you go into typing mode. The utility runs in the system tray and requires no configuration.
Finally, if you would like to get rid of the touchpad completely, you can consider disabling it through the BIOS itself. The exact path that you need to follow to reach the Pointing Devices section in your BIOS may however vary for different laptops.