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tl;dr: Whenever I move the mouse a small distance and click, Windows/Synaptics will pretend I didn't move the mouse at all, reset the cursor position, but still process the click at the wrong position. This happens if the distance is sufficiently small (<30 pixels) and I don't pause (<100ms since start or end of moving mouse).


Example 1:

Mouse is within 30px of a button. I move it onto the button and click. Windows/Synaptics will "correct" the pointer thinking I didn't want to move it 20 pixels. Even though I've moved the mouse onto the button, the moment I click, the mouse will immediately snap back to position it was a second ago (outside of the button). Then the click will be processed in the erroneous location.

Example 2:

This also happens not with just buttons, but anywhere on the screen. For example, say I am editing text. If when editing I put the cursor between these * words and click, everything is fine and the caret is now between these | words. Now, if I move the cursor like so *these | words and click, the mouse will snap back to these *| words and click, resulting in me clicking where I just was: these | words


This is infuriating, and I have been unable to find a setting in Windows or with Synaptics. The hardware/driver in particular is Synaptics Clickpad v1.2 / Synaptics SMBus Touchpad (or something). I have not found any settings within Windows or the Synaptics driver to fix this issue. It seems like a misguided feature. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

(I don't believe this was default behavior with the computer, but I have since changed mouse settings. I also changed a mouse setting in the registry, related to mouse speed and nothing else to my knowledge. Resetting the mouse settings might work, maybe... but would be non-ideal.)

(I would also be willing to install reputable custom drivers compatible with Synaptics hardware; it is a buttonless trackpad though with gestures though, such as 2-finger scroll; I would still like to keep 2-finger scroll if we went that route.)

Thank you for any insight anyone might happen to have!

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  • I am having exactly the same issue on a new Dell XPS 15. It does indeed seem to be a very misguided feature and it's driving me crazy! Did you find a solution? Mar 21, 2015 at 18:05
  • Try the latest Synaptics driver, followed by Windows Update (see optional updates for Synaptics-related entries).
    – harrymc
    Mar 24, 2015 at 15:12
  • You could try disabling every other feature that you enabled one by one until you figure out which one caused the issue. Alternatively, you could note down the features you've turned on with their respective settings and reset all touchpad settings and turn them back on one by one.
    – Vinayak
    Mar 26, 2015 at 0:58
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    Or you could do what I did a while ago with my Elan touchpad and modify Synaptics driver configuration yourself (SynPD.inf, I believe) and see if you can tweak it to your liking. However, this is pretty advanced stuff and if done incorrectly, could cause system instability (multiple BSODs) or worse (possibly wreck hardware?).
    – Vinayak
    Mar 26, 2015 at 1:07

1 Answer 1

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Open registry edit (Windows key + R, type "regedit.exe", press enter) and navigate to "\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Defaults". Then, Scroll down to TappingMotionMickeysLimit and set the value to something lower. You can click on the "decimals option" and input the amount of minimum pixels (I think) you want the mouse to move at a time. Setting it too low (0-1) seems to disable the tap-click function.

Personally, setting it to 3 seems to be the sweet spot. Hope this helps!

You might also need to change RestoreAllDefaults to 0 under "\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPCpl", which seems to restore some settings by itself...

(Idk how this website functions, but if anyone wants to clean up/whatever my reply, then go ahead. I just spent a couple minutes disabling stuff in the registry under synaptics until I found this fix and I had to share the solution I found)

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