Microsoft Precision Touchpad, not very precise

Anonymous
2015-03-02T22:40:42+00:00

I recently purchased a laptop from Microsoft (2015 Dell XPS 13") that uses the Microsoft Precision Touchpad. 

There are a few issues I'm having with this touchpad that I've never noticed with other laptops and I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing these or if there are any fixes. 

  1. There is a noticeable delay when trying to make slow light movements. My finger can move several millimeters before the cursor responds. It may not sound like much, but if you're trying to make subtle movements in photoshop, or select a specific character anywhere it's very noticeable and difficult to use. 
  2. The majority of the time when I lift my finger the cursor will jump several pixels, often moving away from the object I'm trying to target. 
  3. If you use any browser besides IE, two finger scrolling is very choppy and has a similar delay that's experienced in the first issue. 

There are a few other minor annoyances, like poor palm detection and using two hands (one to move the cursor and one to click with) but the issues above are the biggest annoyances, ordered by most annoying to least. 

If anyone has any ways to fix these issues or install different drivers, I'd love to hear about them.

Thanks!

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Search, touch, and mouse

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-08-11T02:11:06+00:00

    So has anyone seen any improvement in the Windows 10 Anniversary update?

    It replaced my Synaptics driver so I'm about to reinstall....

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-03-18T02:00:27+00:00

    On chrome, if you go to chrome://flags/ and disable smooth scrolling, it will actually get smoother.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-04-22T05:31:27+00:00

    Bill is right, and this is happening on a Samsung Notebook 9 Pro with precision touchpad.  There are large amounts of movement before you get out of what I dub "horizontal" or "vertical scroll lockout". 

    In addition, precision touchpads don't send wheel events or gesture events on Edge.  This appears to be a known bug for over two years.  I was even at Microsoft 5 years ago, when they were pushing high-precision touchpads for Windows 8.1 to compete with Apple.  It really doesn't help if Microsoft never finished the software side of things and doesn't respond to the numerous complaints lodged.

    Before this machine I got burned with an HP Envy which had "the worst touchpad" in Microsoft's numerous tests.  These have left me with two nearly unusable machines for doing creative work.  The HP Envy was also taken out by the Windows 10 Upgrade in one of the early updates.  Just couldn't boot anymore.

    Here is a fiddle with all of the numerous problems on Windows with the precision touchpad.  Try to get pan/pinch/zoom (ctrl+wheel) to work in browser app.  You'll see Bill's mentioned issue, and a host of other problems.  This has gone on far too long.

    https://jsfiddle.net/alecazam/my6gntrr/

    I tried disabling the driver Bill mentioned, but when I restarted, then it was re-enabled.  I'm leery about uninstalling it, but would like to see the behavior without Microsoft's erroneous driver in the way.

    I contacted Samsung support already, and they have no clue how to workaround this.  They recommended a reinstall of Windows.  That's not the solution.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-05-29T18:57:31+00:00

    Hi all, I'm a developer on the Precision Touchpad team at MSFT. If you're experiencing issues, I'd love to talk to you more about them - feel free to DM me on Twitter @ross456. Thanks!

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