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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Laptop Scroll Touchpad

Do you have a laptop with a plain old boring touchpad like mine (Dell 600M)?
Plain Touchpad

Do you wish you had a fancy one with scroll bars and a middle mouse button?
Fancy Touchpad

Well, you might and just don't know it. The following might vary depending on your laptop manufacture and installed touchpad drivers.

You can add these features to any touchpad by setting some options in Windows. In the Mouse Settings in the Control Panel there is a tab called Gestures. Here you will find the advanced options for your touchpad.

Mouse Options

Here you can see I have the Scroll Functions added to my touchpad. I also have the Middle Click mapped to the top left corner of the touch pad.

Mouse Options

You can also set the corner clicking to pop up the run dialog, shortcut menu, and other options. You might also have noticed that there is the option to add Back/Forward Buttons. I was really excited about these, but they did not work for me. Let me know if they do for you.

Overall this was a great find. All I was trying to do was change a mouse cursor and found a lot more to play with. So far the extra functions being added to the touchpad have not been in the way of normal usage. For any of these functions to work, you must be up against the very edge of the touchpad so it is hard to accidentally press them. Let me know your laptop has similar options.

Posted by Jon Heizer at 8:50 PM