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. 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. 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. 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!

Those registry keys have no effect on cursor movement. Can you try experimenting with other values and see if you actually experience a difference?

The only changes I made were to set "CurtainDismissDistance" and "CurtainDismissTime" to 0. What I noticed was that there was no longer any delay (spatial or temporal) in cursor moving with respect to me moving my finger on the trackpad.

It really just doesn't matter. As much as it stinks, Dell has to be the one to send the flaw report to their MSP representative. Even if it's entirely Microsoft's problem, Dell is the implementers and legally required to be the initiator. We can all huff and puff forever but it won't matter unless the OEM reports it.

I may not understand the specific "Dell" issue that you are referring to. There's are numerous identical reports from Dell, Levono, Samsung, and other laptops that are all strongly encouraged to adopt the PTP touchpads. Microsoft had trouble with IHV's shaving $0.50 by sticking dirt cheap touchpads and drivers while Apple got this right. So I bought an HP Envy 15 for $1500, and they stuck a $3 touchpad on it that was unusable. Then my second Win 10 update bricked it. The PTP driver on all of the machines I've looked at comes from Microsoft. So ultimately, yes, these hardware vendors will need to decide whether to supply an updated driver from Microsoft, but the root cause and fix starts with Microsoft fixes these issues. They supply the hardware and certify that their hardware configuration works with the Microsoft OS and drivers (and any third-party drivers). If you want any more evidence, then I've repeated all of this on an old Microsoft SurfaceBook and Surface and new SurfaceBook. So now the ball in really in Microsoft court. Talk to Ross on this thread. He really cares about improving this dilemma.

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.

Microsoft Precision Touchpad, not very precise

Anonymous

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.

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.
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.
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!

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63 answers

Anonymous

2018-01-08T04:46:08+00:00

Those registry keys have no effect on cursor movement. Can you try experimenting with other values and see if you actually experience a difference?
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Anonymous

2018-01-06T06:08:49+00:00

The only changes I made were to set "CurtainDismissDistance" and "CurtainDismissTime" to 0. What I noticed was that there was no longer any delay (spatial or temporal) in cursor moving with respect to me moving my finger on the trackpad.
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@CmdrKeene 90,631 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2017-09-09T18:17:23+00:00

It really just doesn't matter. As much as it stinks, Dell has to be the one to send the flaw report to their MSP representative. Even if it's entirely Microsoft's problem, Dell is the implementers and legally required to be the initiator. We can all huff and puff forever but it won't matter unless the OEM reports it.
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Anonymous

2017-09-09T18:15:09+00:00

I may not understand the specific "Dell" issue that you are referring to. There's are numerous identical reports from Dell, Levono, Samsung, and other laptops that are all strongly encouraged to adopt the PTP touchpads. Microsoft had trouble with IHV's shaving $0.50 by sticking dirt cheap touchpads and drivers while Apple got this right. So I bought an HP Envy 15 for $1500, and they stuck a $3 touchpad on it that was unusable. Then my second Win 10 update bricked it.

The PTP driver on all of the machines I've looked at comes from Microsoft. So ultimately, yes, these hardware vendors will need to decide whether to supply an updated driver from Microsoft, but the root cause and fix starts with Microsoft fixes these issues. They supply the hardware and certify that their hardware configuration works with the Microsoft OS and drivers (and any third-party drivers).

If you want any more evidence, then I've repeated all of this on an old Microsoft SurfaceBook and Surface and new SurfaceBook. So now the ball in really in Microsoft court. Talk to Ross on this thread. He really cares about improving this dilemma.
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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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