How do I make my Asus touchpad behave in a reasonable way?

Question

I recently purchased an Asus X550L computer. It came pre-bundled with an ASUS Windows 8.1 that I immediately wiped, to ensure I get a "clean" install without any superfluous junk that the OEM decided that I would "need".

When downloading the touchpad driver (device ID PNP0F03 and ACPI\ETD0108), I got something called the "Smart Gesture" program. In this, I can disable some of the more obvious obnoxious behavior (like having "tap to click" enabled by default, which I absolutely hate). However, the UI leaves a lot to ask for in general. For example, the touchpad has a "left" button area (in the bottom-left corner) and a "right" button area as well. The buttons are not true "physical" buttons, which makes it hard to know (without looking) where the left button and the right buttons are located. This makes it easy to click the right button by mistake.

It also has "tap with two fingers" to perform a right click, which is a step in the right direction, but ideally I would like it to behave like the touchpad on my MacBook Pro: all the touchpad is a big "left" button (regardless of where I click) and clicking with two fingers on the touchpad should perform a right-click. Is this possible, and if so, how?

Answer 1

After a bit of fiddling around, I managed to find a solution that gives me the appropriate behavior. Here are the required steps:

1. Uninstall Smart Gesture, i.e. the ASUS-provided driver (which I had downloaded from the ASUS web site earlier). You may have to reboot afterwards.
2. Install an alternative driver for the ELAN PS/2 Port Smart-Pad. I used this one: http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/KEYBOARD-and-MOUSE/Elantech/ASUS-Notebook-Elantech-Touchpad-Driver-115121-for-Windows-81-64-bit.shtml
3. Reboot the computer again.
4. Start the Smart Gesture program (Yes, the ELAN driver also has a Smart Gesture control panel) and disable most of the gestures/two button/three button actions. Also disable the "tap to click" both with one and two fingers.

5. Fire up Regedit and navigate to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Elantech\SmartPad. Under this key, you will find a set of nice things that you can tweak. I modified the following values (possible others as well, but these are the ones I remember at the time of writing):

   • ClickPad_RightCorner_Click_Enable: 1 (This makes the bottom-right corner of the trackpad be active)
   • ClickPad_RightCorner_Click_Func: 0. (default value is 1. This specifies the button number that will be triggered when you click the bottom-right corner. 0 = left button, 1 = right button, 2 = middle button)
   • Tap_Enable: 0 (if you didn't remember to disable it in the UI, here is the reg key. :)
   • Tap_Two_Finger_Enable: 0 (likewise)
   • ClickPad_Two_Finger_Click_Enable: 1 (this enables right-clicking when clicking with two fingers).
   • ClickPad_Two_Finger_Click_Func: 1 (I think this was the default already. This controls what button gets clicked when clicking with two fingers).

The end result: a PC touchpad that works almost as well as my MacBook Pro. Nice! :)

Update: These suggestions work on Windows 10 as well. The downside is that Win10 has an annoying tendency to update the touchpad drivers at times, changing the settings (for example, I just recently lost the setting of "disable trackpad when USB mouse is connected" for no obvious reason). So if this happens, just re-open the Registry Editor and apply the changes again.