My touchpad stopped supporting multi-touch features. How do I re-enable them?

by

Touchpad multi-touch features are enabled through the drivers installed on your computer. The place to go is the manufacturer's website.
Question:

The scroll function and the enlarge function on my laptop have stopped
working. Anything requiring only one-finger movement works fine. It’s only
those movements using two fingers that have quit. I tried rebooting, restoring,
turning off the touchpad, turning it back on. I’ve search your website and the
internet for drivers, fixer programs, etc. Should I restore to the laptops out
of the box status? I have a Samsung and this is one of those restore options.
Please help. Once I found how to use the features of the touchpad, going back
to up and down arrows and pages and using the scrollbar just seems so much
harder. Maybe ignorance was bliss.

In this excerpt from
Answercast #79, I look at a touchpad that is not allowing multi-touch
commands and how to find the right drivers.

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Touchpad multi-touch features

So, unfortunately… the features you’re describing (we typically refer to them as multi-touch) where you’re using multiple fingers to indicate different kinds of operations – pinch to zoom, two-finger scrolling – that kind of thing – are not part of Windows.

They are not standard functionality on any version of Windows… maybe shy of Windows 8, and even there, I’m not sure yet. They are very common in the Apple. You’ll find them standard on Apple equipment and you’ll also find it standard on most tablets, iPads, and so forth.

But Windows doesn’t include that kind of functionality itself.

Touchpad drivers

However, the various and sundry touchpad manufacturers have included in their drivers the functionality that you described. They’ve added it at the driver level.

What that tells us then is that the problem you’re experiencing is at the driver level.

What I would do in your circumstance is I would go to the computer manufacturer’s website (Samsung in your case) and I would search for and download the most recent drivers for your mouse and/or touchpad.

It may be “mouse and touchpad;” it may be “keyboard and touchpad” or the touchpad may be a separate device. It depends on how the manufacturer decides to bundle things.

I would download the latest drivers that involve the touchpad directly from the manufacturer’s website and reinstall those drivers. Very often, that will restore the functionality. You may in fact also find that in Control Panel, a new touchpad icon has appeared or has been re-enabled that will actually allow you to configure things like the various different multi-touch actions: what they do, how sensitive they might be and so forth.

So, ultimately, that’s the bottom line. Go to the manufacturer; look for updated drivers for that touchpad.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)

Next from Answercast 79 – Why are there so many odd certificates listed in my browser?

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3 comments on “My touchpad stopped supporting multi-touch features. How do I re-enable them?”

  1. I had the same problem and I noticed it was related to installing an external Logitech mouse and keyboard. The drivers for the touchpad do not seem to work fully with the Logitech drivers.

    Reply

  2. I have the opposite problem. My Synaptics touchpad continually resets to allow multi-touch scrolling & zooming even after I’ve reset it. This causes problems in other applications (photoshop, civ V) unexpected zooming etc.

    Reply

  3. hey ladies and gents….. I had the same problem but not anymore.

    what you need to do after you done using photoshop is to reset your mouse pointer.
    Open Mouse Settings.
    Click on The Device Settings Tab.
    At the bottom of the window, there is a RESET DEVICE button.
    click on it and that should sort it out.
    its sad though that I have to do this always when I run Photoshop…..

    The Solution is to reset your touch pad (Synopsis) device

    Reply

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