How to enable precision touchpad in windows 10

In this tutorial we are going to dedicate ourselves to see a very important aspect of our laptops, and it is the fact of enabling Precision Touchpad in Windows to increase the possibilities of the trackpad in terms of its control by gestures. Are you getting the most out of your laptop's touchpad? Well, in this article you can discover it.

And is that the trackpads of laptops are an element that often go unnoticed by most users who buy a new generation laptop (and not so new). Perhaps you intuitively know that if you pinch the panel you can zoom images and web pages, but today's touchpads can do much more than this.

Index of contents

Precision Touchpad Compatibility

One of the big complaints that laptop users have under Windows is that they are not taking advantage of the power of the touch panels of their touchpad. But best of all, this can be easily fixed, at least for certain laptops and panels thanks to the Precision Touchpad.

The truth is that we are not going to reach the level of the Mac for a simple reason, and that is that Windows is a generic operating system so to speak, and the Precision Touchpad is an element that claims to be compatible with all touhcpad that use Synaptics drivers. or Elan. So those who do not support this type of internal controllers will be left out, although they may still work.

Yes, it is true that older computers are going to run out of this substantial improvement in regards to the usability of our mouse, but currently most of the laptops that are on the market will have one of these two controllers available. And in such a case, it will be worth exploring directly at the manufacturer the multitouch options that the laptop has, if its drivers are different.

For example, we have checked the touchpad of a Dell Latitude that is already a few years old, and we have discovered that the manufacturer of the pad is Alps Electric, unfortunately one of the worst manufacturers available on the market. And in this case there is absolutely nothing we can do to fix and improve precision issues with the Precision Touchpad drivers.

What Windows Precision Touchpad Drivers Do

At this point it should be noted that many of the current laptops already have these drivers installed in the operating system, for the simple fact of coming already prepared for use by the manufacturer. But it is possible that if we perform a formatting or the laptop does not include an operating system, these will not be installed and this is where this tutorial is useful.

The touch panels are part of the basic hardware of a laptop, and are a combination of a physical multipoint touch panel (like that of a mobile) and a series of controllers that detect how our fingers behave on this panel. Obviously if your touchpad does not support more than one finger, it will hardly have the ability to interpret gestures.

The case is that manufacturers such as HP, for example, use Synaptics controllers for their panels, while manufacturers such as Gigabyte, in their AERO range, use ELAN-type controllers. It will be precisely a Gigabyte AERO 15 OLED equipment that we use to demonstrate the functionality of the gestures that are included in Precision Touchpad against the basic drivers that the system can install after formatting.

But it is not only about adding gestures, it is also a matter of precision and quality of interaction. Windows Precision Touchpad drivers are made exclusively for this operating system, and in many cases they work better than those provided by the manufacturer in its support section, so an exchange of these drivers will give us a better use experience.

Gestures available with Precision Touchpad

The gestures that we will have available with the installation of Precision Touchpad in Windows 10 will be the following:

Two-finger gestures:

• Touch with two fingers: we bring up the context menu of the element in question Drag with two fingers: we scroll in the place where we are Pinch out or in: we increase the zoom or decrease it Touch and rotate with two fingers: we rotate the image (if the program supports it) Drag to the right or left: on the browser we go forward or backward in the history or directories in the browser Two quick taps on the title bar: window options

Three-finger gestures:

• Drag to the right or left: we change applications in the navigation menu Drag up: maximize application (if there is one) or open multitasking view Drag down: the desktop is displayed Touch: opens the search window of the taskbar

Four-finger gestures:

• Drag left or right: we change the desktop if we have multiple assets Drag up or down: same functions as with three fingers Tap: the notification bar is displayed

These are all or almost all the gestures that Precision Touchpad allows. The possibilities may vary depending on the number of fingers that the panel supports and if you have device-specific drivers that increase or decrease these options.

Install Precision Touchpad in Windows 10

In our case, we have carried out the process on the Gigabyte AERO OLED laptop, which first of all, we must warn that they were already activated by default in the operating system. But since we do not have another compatible unit, we have carried out the entire process, in its case with ELAN controllers, and the entire system has worked without any problem, so you should not have any problems either. In our case we are going to see the installation procedure for the ELAN drivers and a hypothetical installation of the Synaptics drivers to have the Precision Touchpad gestures.

Know if we have Precision Touchpad already installed

If our computer is fairly new, we may already have the latest Windows drivers installed. Nothing will happen if we reinstall them again, but it will be a good way to save us all the steps.

For this, we are going to go to the Windows configuration, clicking on the cogwheel of the start menu. When we enter, we will click on " Devices " and in the left side list we will look for " Touch Panel ".

Here we will find some of the gestures that we saw in the previous list, although as you can see they are not all. You can test if they all work correctly, if not, you can reinstall the drivers as we will see below.

Know what drivers we need

The first thing we must know is what drivers we need, and we can easily find this out from the device manager.

So we are going to right click on the start and then we will choose the “ device manager ” option. Once inside, we will display the option " Mouse and other pointing devices " and we will open the drop-down list.

Here we will know which controller used the touchpad of our laptop. If a name known as the ones we have mentioned is not shown, then we must right-click on the first available entry in the list and choose " Properties ".

In this way we will see the characteristics of the controller, and in the " manufacturer " section we will have who signs their controllers.

• In this case, if they are ELAN we will download them from this Softpedia link AND if they are Synaptics from this other link obtained directly from Lenovo

ELAN touchpad installation

We are going to start by installing the drivers for ELAN touchpads, so we will download the corresponding drivers from where we have commented.

In this specific case, we are going to download an installation package with a.CAB extension, so the easiest and most intuitive way to install it will be by opening the file directly, and copying its contents into a normal and current folder. Similarly, if we have a program like WinRAR or 7-Zip, we can right-click and unzip its content.

The result will be the same, a folder with all the content inside the CAB where we will have to locate “ setup ”.

Then double click on it and the installation wizard will open. We just have to click a few times on "next" and accept the license terms and conditions. " We won't even have to restart the device, just finish the wizard when it's done.

To see the results, we will do the same procedure as in the section where we saw if the drivers were already installed. That is, Start -> Settings -> Devices -> Touch Panel.

Synaptics touchpad installation

Now let's see what the process would be like if we had a touchpad of this brand.

“ELAN” will appear in the screenshots, but in your case it should put “Synaptics”, in any case, the procedure to follow will be as shown.

In this case we will go back to the device manager and right click on " Synaptics Input Device " in whose panel we will choose " Update driver ".

Now we will start a search and install driver wizard. We must choose the option " Search for driver software on the computer ", since we will have previously downloaded them from the site where we have linked.

In the next window we are going to click on " Choose from a list of available drivers on the computer " to choose the driver that we will need ourselves.

Next, a list of controllers should appear, where we will see one or two options that will put "Synaptics Input Device" and another generic. We are going to move from this list and we are going to select the option " Use disk... ".

A pop-up window will open where we must choose " Browse... ". In this way we can navigate to the directory where we have the controller. It goes without saying that previously we will have needed to decompress it in a directory so that they can be used.

Entering the directory we will only see two files, and we will have to choose the " Autorun " one.

Now the list of drivers has been updated and two new ones will appear. Of course, we must choose the one that says " Synaptics Pointing Device ". It will be the controller of our touchpad from the manufacturer we are seeing.

Now we are going to click on " next " and possibly a warning window will appear indicating that the controller is not compatible. This is completely a lie, so we just accept to continue with the installation of the Precision Touchpad drivers.

Perhaps it will ask us to restart the device, so we will gladly accept and on the return we can verify in the configuration that we already have the gestures activated, as long as the touchpad is compatible with them, of course.

Conclusion and interesting tutorials

This is our tutorial on how to install the Precision Touchpad drivers for Synaptics or ELAN touch panels. You can try installing them on touchpads from other manufacturers, although you run the risk that it is not completely compatible, or that the precision does not improve at all and they support gestures.

However, there is always the option to revert the configuration by updating the driver again from the device manager, choosing the option to search for drivers on the network.

We leave you with some interesting tutorials:

If you have any questions or problems, let us know in the box below. Does your laptop support gestures? Which touchpad do you think is the best?