I love my Dell XPS 13 but the touchpad drove me a little insane when I first got it. Even the slightest touch with my hand while typing would send the cursor all over the place. Fortunately, there are ways to fix it, so if you want to tweak your touchpad settings on the Dell XPS 13, here’s how to do it.
Before Windows 8, we had to use third-party applications to tame touchpads, but Microsoft introduced a built-in sensitivity setting that helped a lot. Since then, steady improvements in drivers have made touchpads much easier to live with and enabled us to turn down those that weren’t so easy. We can do the same here.
Tweak the touchpad settings on the Dell XPS 13
There are a few things you can do to tame the XPS 13 touchpad. You can tweak a setting, turn off two finger pinch or change the drivers. Let’s take a quick look at each.
Tweaking the touchpad
A couple of quick tweaks to the touchpad can make a big difference.
1. Navigate to Settings, Devices and Mouse & touchpad.
2. Select Additional mouse options in the right pane.
3. Select the Pointer Options tab in the new window.
4. Uncheck ‘Enhance pointer precision’.
5. Slow the Select a pointer speed down incrementally until you find a setting you like.
Turn off two finger pinch and reverse scrolling direction
Turning off these two settings have made a bit of a difference for many users although I haven’t tried it myself.
1. Navigate to Settings, Devices and Mouse & touchpad if you closed the window.
2. Select Reverse scrolling direction. Test out the new setting to see if it works better.
3. Deactivate two finger scrolling in the settings window.
Either or both of these are supposed to tame the Dell XPS 13 touchpad.
Change the touchpad drivers on the Dell XPS 13
Dell recommends keeping the Windows default drivers as they are the correct ones for the touchpad. However, many users have said that changing the drivers has completely fixed the issues they were having with the touchpad.
1. Right click the Windows Start button and select Device Manager.
2. Right click and disable both HID-compliant touch pad and I2C HID Device.
3. Download a new Synaptics driver from their website.
4. Right click PS/2 Mouse in Device Manager and select Update Driver Software.
5. Select manual update and Browse my PC.
6. Point the installer to the new Synaptics driver and install it. Ignore the Windows message saying incompatible driver if it appears. It is compatible.
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