Damaged touchscreen, disabled in Device Manager, does it still generate interrupts?

Question

A friend of mine has (had) a touchscreen laptop. While carrying it, they hit the screen and the glass cracked. The damage is hardly noticeable when looking at the monitor, but unfortunately it is also causing constant touch screen input in random areas of the screen (all the time, there are tens or hundreds of such "clicks" per second). I've disabled it in Windows Device Manager, but I'm wondering: is the device still active and generating interrupts to the CPU which are then simply discarded by the OS? Or is it actually physically disabled? In the first case, should I be worried about performance losses given how much the CPU is spammed?

Answer 1

The type of disable you performed would result in the software blocking the interrupts from the display. To really disable the touch sensor physically you will need to either flip a physical disconnect switch (the last of which I saw in 2008) or open up the laptop and disconnect the power to it (not recommended).

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However, the way Windows OS is built results in all HID (Human Interface Device) inputs being processed in a time-frame dedicated to it.

Windows allots certain CPU cycles to all applications and then switches the execution to them one after the other very fast; this makes it appear that things are happening simultaneously like updating the display, processing input and running programs. As the time allotted to process HID inputs are fixed, you need not worry about "CPU Spamming".