Synaptics: Disabling touch page, gestures, and more

Are you using a laptop? Does your laptop has a TouchPad? Does the TouchPad messup with your typing rhythm? If so, read on.

Accidental Touch on a TouchPad: What's an annoyance

I've got a new Fujitsu S6420 few months ago. This is a nice laptop. The size is compact. It is easy to carry around. But because of its compactness, the touch pad is so close to keyboard. While typing my thumb would accidentally touch the touch pad. The cursor position would change and mess up my typing. I am kindda guy who don't like taking my hand off the keyboard. So, I get really annoyed when my hand accidentally touch the keypad.


Plugging Mouse Doesn't Help

Mouse isn't like headphone. In most computers, the speakers is disabled, when you plug in a headphone. Unfortunately, when you plug in a USB mouse. Both TouchPad and USB mouses work at the same time. So, plugging in a USB mouse doesn't help me.

My Savior: Synaptics

Google is my friend. I find this solution by googling "disabling TouchPad", and following webboards. I found the company Synaptic, which offers drivers for TouchPad [ here ]. It works! Here is how

What you need to do are

1. Download and install the driver [ Again from here ].
2. Restart your computer. Synaptics driver will appear on your taskbar (Arrows 1 and 2).
3. Open "Pointing Device Properties" (Arrow 3).
4. Click "Disable" (Arrow 4). 

 Done! Now, the only active device is your USB mouse. At anytime you can click enable to activate the TouchPad.

Additional Features

There are few more cool features with Synaptics. You can set them up by clicking "Settings..." (Arrow 5). You can see the details [ here ]

The followings are few features that I like (and use)

Scrolling:

• Vertical scrolling: This is similar to wheel-mouse where you can move an active page up and down. Just place your finger on the right edge and drag up and down. Alternatively, you don't have to drag at the edge, if you use two fingers. Try it!
• Horizontal scrolling: Similar to up-down scrolling, horizontal scrolling allows you to move page left and right. I find this feature quite useful when I am reading a document or viewing picture with large width. This time place your finger on the bottom of the touch and drag left and right.
• Adjusting scrolling area: Another great things about Synaptics is it allows you to adjust the scrolling areas on the left and the bottom of the TouchPad. Just choose Scrolling->One-Finger-Scrolling->Scrolling Region and adjust the green area in the picture.
• Chiral scrolling: Most TouchPads are very small. How much can you do vertical and horizontal scrolling? Not much, eh? Synaptics makes a cleaver move for TouchPad. Suppose you are doing a vertical scroll. You would touch the top of the scrolling area and drag down. When there is no way to go, you can make a clock-wise spiral move as in the picture. The active will keep scrolling down as long as you move your finger spirally. To scroll up, just reverse the spiral direction. Not surprisingly, this gesture works for horizon (left-right) scrolling as well.

Pinch Zoom

This feature works like multi-touch in iPhone. Just touch two points on a TouchPad. You can zoom in and out by dragging those two points closer and away, respectively, from each other

Edge Motion

Again, most touch pad is very small. One swipe might not bring a mouse pointer to the point you want. This is especially true for multi-monitor environment. With this feature, you can drag a pointer to the edge of the TouchPad in a single swipe. As long as your finger still touch the TouchPad, the mouse pointer will continue moving to the dragging direction. Again, you can also define the region where you call "edge" (like in scrolling).

There are more...

I just select few features that I like. There are a lot more features from Synaptics. Their utilities is not limited to TouchPad. Other utilities are for example ClickPad in MacBook.

Well, the best thing is that it works on almost any laptop and it's free!