How to disable gestures (charms bar, edge swipes, etc...) without changing the registry

Hi Pain Killer17,

 Because you have a new laptop do you know if you register it with your manufacturer you can have unlimited free support for one year? Gateway support has been very helpful to me on more than one occasion. I have only used telephone support with them.

 I am amazed that you do not have the HARDWARE & SOUND option in your control panel. I am going to post a series of screenshots and hope the images help. If they are of no help to you perhaps they will help someone else. I think images and words are better than words alone.

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Image one below is a cropped version of my control panel without showing the hardware & sound feature. Notice the "View by:" in the upper right corner, if I select "Category" then I see Image two below.

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Image two shows the Hardware & Sound feature. This Control Panel image should look familiar to users of older versions of Windows. I only changed the control panel "View by:" from Large Icons to Category.

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Image three shows the display after I click on the Hardware & Sound line. In the Devices and Printers section I then click on Mouse.

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Image four shows the Mouse Properties window I click on the ELAN tab then the Options... button.

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Image five shows the ELAN window. Under the One-finger tab I clink on the Edge Swipe box at the bottom left, then uncheck the "Enable" box and click on "Apply" then "Ok".

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Image six shows the Sensitivity setting under the Additional tab, after changing the setting click Apply then Ok.

 Your images may be different. Remember you can have free support from your manufacturer for the first year. The version of Windows 8.1 installed on your computer may be different than mine.  I hope my efforts have been helpful.

On my brand new laptop I do not have a hardware & sound option in 8.1

The Charms Bar acts like a virus. Sporadic, averaging one time every 2 or 3 minutes appearing, freezing all work in progress.

Once I change a setting to lesson the sensitivity on the elan touchpad, the OS finds a way to over come it, within the hour I have the horrific charms bar popping up.

Even when reading documents, emails with no touchpad movement it pops up.

Again Microsoft level 1 & level 2 techs tried to fix it for me and failed & gave up.

Now Microsoft will not even respond to my emails requesting help or at least an update on this matter.

I will never purchase another Microsoft product, Hello Mac.

I've had a Windows 8 laptop for a few days and the charms bar/settings pages that kept popping up out of nowhere were driving me absolutely insane.  BUT, I finally figured out how to turn them off. 

I went into control panel>hardware and sound>mouse>device settings>settings.  From there you can adjust a lot of the trackpad settings, including DISABLE EDGE SWIPES. 

I have a Toshiba Satellite with a synaptics mouse/trackpad, so i cant guarantee this works with all models, devices, etc. 

Windows 8 for laptop is now tolerable!  Hope this helps!

Used your advice on my HP 2000 laptop and now I no longer have to slide my laptop to the far right of me to to avoid using the right side of my touch pad, your recommendation worked like a charm. I guess I won't be going to a mental institution after all (charm bar was driving me insane.) A thousand thank yous.

that works great for my mouse pad thanks, but when the cursor is in the lower right corner it flicks the charms on again.  this is not a good feature.