If your laptop hasn't automatically updated to the latest drivers for your touchpad, you may find some improvements have been made in the recent past. These gestures can either be turned off or-if you keep accidentally performing an action-changed to be easier or harder to perform. Under More Gestures, you can customize various swiping and pinching gestures for opening certain apps or swiping through different windows. Under Point & Click, you can adjust the tracking speed, the controls for performing a secondary click, and change the tap-to-click setting, which can cause a lot of accidental clicks if it's on.Ĭlick Scroll & Zoom to adjust gesture controls for zooming in and out and rotating the screen. If that tab is missing but you know you have a Synaptics touchpad, you may be able to bring it back by rolling back the driver or using a registry tweak-though note that we haven't tested this ourselves.įor Mac users, go to System Preferences > Trackpad to view settings that control point-and-click, scroll, zoom, and gesture controls. Head to the same Additional Mouse Options window mentioned above and look for an extra tab with touchpad settings-often, you'll find more options hidden there.

If your laptop falls into this category, you may have other settings hidden in Windows that offer more control. Many modern laptops use touchpads designed with Microsoft's drivers in mind, but older models might still use drivers from manufacturers like Elan or Synaptics. Head to Settings > Devices > Mouse > Additional Mouse Options, and you can also try enabling or disabling Enhance Pointer Precision. Multi-touch gestures could also be causing you grief, so turn those off if you find you keep invoking them accidentally. In addition, you might want to turn off the tap-to-click features, or the lower-right-corner feature that comes enabled by default. Head to Settings > Devices > Touchpad and change the touchpad sensitivity. Not all touchpads are created equal, but there's a good chance your laptop's drivers will let you adjust a few settings, allowing you to customize how your touchpad responds to your movements. (And hey, clean those dirty keyboard keys while you're at it, okay?) Adjust Your Settings If it can more accurately detect your fingers dragging along the surface, it may respond better. If it's been a while since you gave it a once-over, grab a soft cloth, moisten it with a bit of water (or isopropyl alcohol, if necessary), and give the touchpad a good cleaning. It's gross to think about, but there's a lot of dirt, grime, and skin oils that can build up on your laptop over time. If you're tired of dealing with a cursor that won't work properly, here are a few solutions that may help. After all, it's your main point of interaction with the computer, so if your cursor is slow, imprecise, or jumping all over the place, you're going to have a bad time. It doesn't matter how powerful your laptop is: the touchpad can make or break your experience.

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