Laptop Lament

I've been struggling with my own laptop for a while now. It's slow, the screen is dim, and today the in-built touchpad wouldn't work. There was a rather dark circle shaped across its surface, suggesting that it had either burnt out or I'd spilled something on it. I normally use a mouse but the touchpad means that I don't have to take one with me. My wireless mouse is also pointless as, although the mouse itself is wireless, its sensor has a very long itself between itself and its USB adapter. So today was the day that I finally found an excuse for a new upgrade, but the touchpad really prevented me from going to work out in the field. So I googled it. And one of the most obvious solutions was to check that I hadn't manually displayed it. So I looked at the Fn keyboard shortcuts, found one that vaguely represented a touchpad, and hey presto, it worked! As I was on a roll, I went into control panel and looked up the brightness settings, which oddly brought up the power options. But after a quick google search later, I found out that the brightness settings were actually at the bottom of the screen! An odd place to put them but two out of three problems are now fixed and the excuses for a new computer are rapidly draining away.