Can we disable the charms bar in Windows 8?

Agree with dtel_995 and other recent posters. Win8 was too radical a change and looks as if it has not been tested by working users as opposed to techies or players.

In case anyone has missed it, I have copied this from geggsie who posted on another thread.

" Go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > (under Device and Printers) click Mouse > (Under Mouse properties) click **Device Settings Tab >**click the Settings button > un-tick the **'Enable Edge Swipe'**option > click Apply. "

This gets rid of the charms bar problem from the touch pad. The other suggestions I found did not work for me, including 3rd party offerings like winaero.

I have a Synaptics touch pad, but my driver version 17.x.x.x did not have this option. I uninstalled the 17.x.x.x driver and donwloaded and installed the older generic Synaptics 16.3.15.1 driver, and unchecked "enable edge swipe". Other touch pad functionality seems to be fine with this older driver.

It is like getting my computer back from being hijacked by a crazy clown like the one played by Tim Curry in the movie 'It'. I cannot express how much more productive I am able to be - typing, doing graphics, web browsing, downloading, email and the rest - without the charms bar and switch screen to the Metro interface appearing every few seconds, interrupting concentration and needing touchpad movements and keystrokes to get rid of it.

If you have a Synaptics touch pad. this is definitely worth a try. If you have a different brand, you could examine its properties and see whether there is a corresponding option.

I do not understand why Synaptics have removed this option from the later drivers. I tried every option given by the first installed 17.x.x.x driver and the latest 17.x.x.x driver from Synaptics but nothing corresponds to this.

I totally agree with that. I was willing to say the touch screen itself they can keep the charms but should still allow it to be disarmed. The touchpad is not the place for doing this. First of all many users with high resolution and even the fastest scrolling speed cannot go from right to left and cover the whole screen so common sense is to start on the far right.. Unfortunately this built in function in my brain that I have been doing for years is now triggering a charms bar instead of scrolling where I want it. FYI that is the only touchpad related charms bar I know of.. The other 3 are mouse position related such as moving the mouse to very top right and either down or to the left will cause charms.. The least intrusive is the bottom right moving up. The very end of that bar is clickable for a shortcut to show desktop.. I have it happen to me when I pass my mouse slightly over the show desktop and moving it back into position and it pops that **** up... I found ways on my specific build to disable the far right to left from touchpad and to disable the top right moving left. This was highly annoying because ironically when you have a maximized window there happens to be an X out of window option such has existed in windows since the foundation of time... However again I slightly over veer with my mouse since I do keep it on fast speed it helps me be productive but god forbid I move my mouse like I used to.. Basically I would drag to very top right so fast and then slightly correct my mouse to hover over the X to close a window... However this behaviour I got used to for 20 years now was instead popping up the charms bar 100-200 times a day on me. Well my torment goes in with my laptop but I am making a new server for my downstairs office and am going back to Windows 7 Pro in that setup so I can regain stability and ease of use. The new Win8 also let me tell you is not very fault tolerant and there is a "Wait for all programs to close" bar when you try to restart... Basically windows has an unresponsive program and until it can safely terminate you have to wait for this 10 minute process of this message staying on your screen... Now if you just hard reboot, like in the past it most likely would not hurt you.. Maybe a 5% or less chance you would not be able to boot and have the need for using all the new recovery tools windows gave us in this release because you need multiple ways to recover because not any one of them is reliable. Win8 you hard reboot there is a 50% chance you are going to have to reinstall your OS, refresh it, recover it, etc or use the system disc to try and repair the MBR (Master Boot Record) They just suck and do not care at all... No one from MS comes in here with a fix or to even say it is escalated to a higher level. So many users feel the same way and if they could read they would see this charms bar implementation was poorly thought out and terribly executed. Did someone just single handedly make the decision to do this or did the whole team agree on this terrible idea that the mouse position and touchpad would cause so much unwanted behavior and imply there is no fix for it when I have personally found 2 of the 4 fixes and I dont work there? Better off to stick with Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit... I got **** done with that setup and I am returning to it because these idiots do not care about this train wreck of an OS.