How do I turn off the gesture swipe from my windows 8 laptop?

moving your fingers across a tiny little touch pad forever without any advanced gestures is a pain for most people. I love my multigesture. I love my two finger scrolling and swipe to the right to go between apps, plus swipe to the left to open charms. Everyone who reviewed the hp m6-1105dx said the same thing, they love multigesture, especially when  you have to deal with full screen apps (which is a lot to take in). 

Now! If your laptop has synaptics as the program that controls the touch pad, it will be in control panel\hardware and sound\synaptics touchpad 

there you will find the settings.

Otherwise there is another program controlling it that still should be under hardware and sound. If not, then you must have an acer or something that doesn't have a good set of control panel programs, and in that case, it might be under mouse settings in device and printers. Look around for yourself. if it's there though then you know you have a bad brand of computer.

Please be polite in the microsoft community. By saying, "there wasn't an option for that through mouse properties and settings... I am growing impatient," you can be much more polite.

go to control panel, and go to "synaptics touchpad 1.7" or whatever your version is (honestly it says touch-pad in the name so...). Then un-check any multi-gesture feature you don't want, hit apply and it will disable those features. For future reference all the touch pad settings are always through synaptics by default unless the market changes its standards. Mouse settings are for mice you plug in, not touch-pads.

FOR ANYONE WHO IS HAVING TROUBLE TURNING THE SETTINGS ON, UNCHECK, APPLY, THEN re-CHECK, APPLY, AND THE MULTI-GESTURE FEATURES WILL BE RESTORED. I had a problem turning them back on after synaptics decided to stop working. Hitting the apply button "refreshed" the settings.

No. Your answer is smug and inaccurate. Not all systems have the same touchpad options in Mouse settings. I know how to find the Synaptics settings tab, and believe me if there was a way to disable the gesture swipes I would have done it already. The only way I was able to disable it was to run the Registry script suggested in an earlier post in this thread.

And for anyone who's also annoyed that the cursor keeps moving even after you wanted to stop and click somewhere, this is what worked for me. Since Synaptics and Microsoft refuse to make it possible to disable this idiotic feature, the next best thing for me was to cover the top 1/4" or so of the touchpad with a piece of clear tape. That way my finger never gets to the top region of the touchpad where the cursor decides to just keep on moving. Works fine, and so much less a hassle using the touchpad now. No more accidentally clicking in the wrong cell because the cursor didn't stay where you wanted it to.

I JUST SAID THAT IF IT DOES NOT HAVE SYNAPTICS, IT EITHER HAS THE SETTINGS IN MOUSE SETTINGS OR ANTOHER PROGRAM. Read the post before you say I am inaccurate. Unless you are saying that there is no way to change it without going into the registry? Well I guess your manufacturer isn't very supportive, or you are incapable of downloading the proper drivers, and software. Whatever the case, I am telling you that there is always a setting, and like I said synaptics might not be where the setting is, and mouse might not be where it is either. Read the post, then give me your "smug and inaccurate" opinion on something I didn't even say and you misinterpreted. I KNOW THAT NOT ALL SYSTEMS HAVE THE EXACT SAME SETTINGS.