Sunday, October 1, 2017

SOLUTION: Disabling Tap-to-Click on Alienware 13 Touchpad - Windows 10 Update

Back in early 2015 I bought my first Alienware 13 gaming laptop and struggled to figure out how to disable the tap-to-click feature of that computer's touchpad under Windows 8. Well that was a different Alienware 13 (it was the "R1" model) and a different Windows. I now own an Alienware 13 R2, and this weekend I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 on it- only to discover that I was no longer able to disable tapping on this computer under Windows 10. So I was back to square one...

The first time I logged into Windows 10 on my laptop, I opened the Start menu and searched for Touchpad settings, expecting to see the same set of options available under Windows 8.1. Sadly, I was met with this confusing and anemic list of changeable settings:


Literally the only option I was able to configure was Touchpad sensitivity. Even though there was text saying, "Taps: Use taps to click, right-click, and select" there was no way to disable them. Clicking Additional settings just brought up the generic Windows Mouse Properties dialog, with no options at all for the touchpad.

I went to the Dell support page for the Alienware 13 R2 and located the Synaptics Touchpad Driver under Mouse, Keyboard & Input Devices. After installing this driver and rebooting, I checked the Windows 10 touchpad settings again and still only saw the single option to adjust Touchpad sensitivity. Nothing for taps. However, this time when I clicked Additional settings, something new appeared:

While none of the tabs in this dialog had any useful settings, clicking the "Click to change Touchpad settings" link on the Touchpad tab brought me here:

Now, on this Pointing Devices screen if you have the touchpad icon selected at the top and Sensitivity selected on the left, you should see a "Tapping >" link on the right side of the dialog. When you click that link, you then see this page:

Finally, you can uncheck the box next to Tap to click and then click Save. I did this and restarted Windows just to make sure the setting "stuck." And it did!

If these steps didn't work for you, or if you're having trouble finding the correct settings on Windows 8.1, please check out my original post about disabling tapping on Alienware laptops.

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