What are precision touchpads? Precision touchpads are more accurate, sensitive and offer more touchpad gestures when compared to standard touchpads. Precision touchpads were first introduced with Windows 8 laptops and can be seen in most of the laptops available today.
If your Windows 10 laptop is equipped with a precision touchpad, you will see precision touchpad settings under Settings > Devices > Touchpad. But what if your laptop doesn’t have precision touchpad?
Luckily, it turns out that standard Synaptics or Elan touchpads found in most laptops meet precision touchpad requirements. So, you can enable precision touchpad on your Windows 10 laptop by just installing a precision touchpad driver.
If your laptop doesn’t support precision touchpad officially, then your laptop manufacturer likely has not released precision touchpad driver for your laptop model. So, you need to install Synaptics or Elan precious touchpad driver to enable precision touchpad on your Windows 10 laptop.
Complete the given below directions to install the precision touchpad driver on any Windows 10 laptop and enable precision touchpad.
Install precision touchpad driver and enable precision touchpad
Step 1: First of all, check if your laptop has Synaptics or Elan touchpad. To do that, type main.cpl in the Run command box, press Enter key to open Mouse properties and then click Advanced settings button to see if your laptop is equipped with Elan or Synaptics touchpad.
Step 2: Download Synaptics or Elan precision touchpad drivers from either Lenovo or Softpedia.
These precision touchpad drivers support most of the laptop manufacturers out there. So, whether you are using Dell, Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Acer or any other laptop, these drivers will most likely work on your PC.
Step 3: Extract the downloaded zip file to get a folder containing precision touchpad drivers. Save that folder on your desktop for easy access.
Step 4: Open Device Management. To do so, right-click on the Start button on the taskbar and then click Device Manager to open the same.
Step 5: In the Device Manager, expand Mice and other pointing devices. Right-click on Synaptics Pointing Device entry and then click Update driver option to open Update drive wizard.
Step 6: Click Browse my computer for driver software link. This option will help you install the downloaded precision touchpad driver.
Step 7: Next, click Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer link.
Step 8: As you can see, the Update Drivers wizard will now display a list of compatible devices now. Click Have Disk button.
Step 9: You will now see Install From Disk dialog. Click the Browse button to browse to the precision touchpad driver that you downloaded and select Autorun.inf file present in the root of the folder.
Click Open button and then click OK button.
Step 10: Click Next button. Click Yes button when you see the confirmation dialog. Windows 10 will begin installing the precision touchpad driver.
Step 11: Once the precision touchpad driver is installed, you will see “Windows has successfully updated your drivers” message. That’s it!
Save your work, close all running applications and then reboot your PC once.
Step 12: After the reboot, open the Settings app, navigate to Devices > Touchpad to see all precision touchpad settings. Here, you can change precision touchpad settings.
Hope you find this guide helpful!
Michael Matteson says
I did this on my HP Pavilion. The touchpad is not disabled at all. I turned it off in settings and I can still move the cursor with the touchpad, which is what I was trying to disable.
Brian Lyons says
Thank you!! This worked like a charm! After hours of trying other community repairs I found this and it actually worked.
Tejas Pranjale says
After completing this process laptop touchpad may not works. then just use a usb mice or keyboard to search device manager and navigate by arrow keys. go to synaptic touchpad properties. there will lot of options like driver info, update driver, roll back drivers, uninstall drivers. just select update driver and select online search for driver update. and boom your touchpad will start working with precision drivers. I tested this meathod in Lenovo Ideapad 330 ryzen 5 (15ARR) model.
Thanks a lot for this.
Henry N says
I’ve been looking for this solutions. It worked like a charm for my old VAIO. Thank you.
myusrn says
Why would you need to do this if your touchpad is already a windows precision touchpad driver enabled synaptics based piece of hardware as shown in thinkpad touchpad example? On my thinkpad the touchpad automatically loads and uses the windows precision touchpad drivers.
What would be much more interesting is a story for a windows precision touchpad drivers enabled touchpad for use with desktop keyboard environment in lieu or in conjunction with a mouse pointing device. Why does nobody make this? All i can find are touchpads that simulate being a windows precision touchpad using firmware that manipulates the standard issue mouse driver.
Sriram says
I couldnt find the autorun.inf in the folder after extracting it.
Nino says
Hi,
I use Lenovo ideapad 330 and after this steps I can no longer use even the regular Touchpad functions, it doesn’t work at all.
Can you please help?
Nino
Begrudging_Windows_User says
Hey, so I did this exact thing with my 2018 HP Spectre x360, and it successfully did what I wanted it to do (be able to close tabs with a three-finger tap), but some of the other things I wanted are not working. Specifically, when I configured the three-finger swipes to switch tabs, it would also do what the Synaptic Driver would do (switch windows, which is really annoying). How do I stop it from doing this? The Precision Driver is the best, but I really hope I can get this to work…
ray says
It doesn’t work on an asus x556uq
Mohamed Benchohra says
In the case of ELAN hardware there is no autorun file, should I choose ETD.inf instead?
A says
That is great tutorial and worked for my ThinkPad W540 perfectly, also worked for my friends HP Spector