Sounds like the touchpad is disabled in software. What brand and model is your laptop? Do you have an external mouse plugged in? If you go to Control Panel>Mouse, do you have a trackpad tab you can change settings. In another thread, someone was able to toggle their touchpad on with Fn+F7. On my keyboard, it's Fn+F5. Try looking at the icons on your function keys (F1-F12) and see if one of them has a picture of a touchpad on it.