Anyway to turn off tap on touchpad on a Z?

Is there anyway to turn off tap on the Z touchpad. I've looked and I can't find a Windows 7 function to turn it off. I looked at the Synoptics control panel and I can't find one there either. I never intentionally use it. I use the mouse button. The problem is that it happens unintentionally all the time. I've tried playing with the sensitivity but that really doesn't help. I'd just like it to be off.

 

You don't have this screen??

 

Thanks. I was clicking on the expand me box and looking at the options under it. I totally ignored just clicking on it.

 

It's a poorly designed menu, I agree.

 

I'm looking for a good way to disable the whole touchpad, it's pretty annoying to have the cursor jump all around when typing. I can bind a registry key to F8, but I can't find what regkey controls it.

 

Just look for the features in the menu like palm check and turn those to your liking, it will then become way less likely to do something. And 2nd, if using external mouse, just install latest version (not from sony but search google) and check the ''disable touchpad when usb mouse enabled'' or something like that.

 

I have palmcheck to maximum and it still jumps around, and sometimes I hit the mousebutton too which messes things up. So I really need to disable the whole thing. It can be disabled from vaio control center, and it seems to store the configuration into an xml file, but you can also disable it from the synaptics control panel applet and I would assume it stores that setting as a regkey but I don't find it.

 

IIRC there's this program out on the net that disables touchpads as soon as you start typing... i dont exactly remember what it's called, try googling it

 

I did find 2 of those earlier, one of them doesn't work on win7 and the other was recommended by PCworld but they didn't check it and it was actually a trojan virus.

 

Oh wow fail. Okay, never mind then.

 

the one called touchfreeze doesn't work, and i have spent hours looking into process monitor to try and find what regkey synaptics uses to disable the pad, no dice.

 

Hello e14,
posted this in the z official owners thread - hadn't seen your special thread, so I'll just make a copy of my answer here as well. Hope it helps...

"The only way to disable the touchpad is from mouse properties, Device Settings tab, and then disable the Synaptics device. I'm afraid configuring this through a hotkey from windows is not possible, as far as I know. There are third party apps that can build hot key macros for windows, and if my memory serves me well, a forum member has posted sth relevant a few days ago. In addition to that it looks like the enable/disable feature is some kind of registry entry/value. Would that do for you? I'll look into it when I have some time, soon I hope.

EDIT: The registry key where all that lies is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2_1. The relevant key is DisableDevice. It seems that it does not work on the fly."

 

you can do this in Linux

however, it seems like it's moderately difficult to get Linux working *well* on a Z............. though I'm hoping to have some success with that, otherwise I'll have to sell my Z lol

You're making me nervous, though -- what's wrong with the touchpad? Is it over-sensitive or does the mouse move as you type on the Z's keyboard?

 

I have no problems with the touchpad on my Z12, it's pretty good. I love how it's multitouch so I can use two-finger-scrolling and three-finger swipes (back, forward), as well as cursor momentum.

However, it's not as smooth and responsive as the Synaptics pad on my Acer A110 netbook; i.e. it's not _the_ best.