touchpad settings | Rob Pegoraro

I’ve yet to ease into a new computer without having to fuss with some of the default settings, and the HP Spectre x360 laptop sitting on this desk has fit right into the pattern.

Most of the tweaking has involved its touchpad, because I’ve always found the defaults in Windows to be too jumpy. (I’ve said the same about some Mac touchpad defaults.) But after a few days of clicking around the stock Synaptics software, I realized I should first dump that for drivers supporting Microsoft’s more elegant Precision Touchpad software.

The directions I found on Reddit (embedded here after the jump) worked, and then I could easily shut off the touch behaviors I couldn’t stand.

“Touchpad sensitivity”: I changed this from the default “Medium” to “Low” because, again, jumpy touchpads bother me. I may try turning it back off to see if disabling the following two options made the standard sensitivity acceptable.
“Tap with a single finger to single-click”: This is the one setting I change on every laptop. If I want to click, I’m more than happy to press down so the touchpad makes an audible click; having it treat a stray touch as a click leaves me randomly dumping the cursor into documents and windows and feeling generally stabby as a result.
“Press the lower right corner of the touchpad to right-click”: I disabled this because it’s easier for me to remember to tap with two fingers to right-click than to keep track of which side of this invisible line I’m about to tap.

I hope this advice–which should also work on any other laptop running Microsoft’s Precision Touchpad software–makes for a more pleasant laptop computing experience. If you have other suggested settings changes, please share them in the comments.

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Total CES PR pitches received this week: 119 (not counting e-mails from the Consumer Electronics Association itself).

12/10/2013: Q&A With Rep. Jared Polis (D-Co.), DisCo Policy Forum 2013

At the Disruptive Competition Project’s one-day conference, I quizzed one of the few representatives in Congress with a tech-startup background (he co-founded the e-greeting-card ~~company Blue Mountain Arts~~ site bluemountainarts.com) about issues like patent reform, NSA surveillance, immigration policy, and the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Left unanswered: Why I still get all of my Christmas cards in paper form.

12/12/2013: Evolution of ID Theft, State of ID Theft

I discussed trends in identity theft at the National Consumers League’s first conference devoted to the subject with Verizon security director Andy Bonillo, Hart Research Associates v.p. Abigail Davenport, Allan Friedman of the Brookings Institution, and assistant U.S. attorney general Zach Intrater. Surprising thing I learned: ID theft can be a slow and arduous line of work.

12/13/2013: #TabletChat Tablet Usage in Business Twitter Chat, IDG Mobility

Another busy hour of debating the finer points of tablet usage. I realized halfway through that I should have been performing my chat-host duties on a tablet instead of a tablet–not for intellectual-integrity reasons, but because I was eating lunch as I typed, and it’s easier to wipe crumbs off a screen than to brush them out of a keyboard.

12/13/2013: Unlocking Phones Is One Thing, Unlocking DMCA Regulatory Capture Is Another, Disruptive Competition Project

The major wireless carrier’s agreement to unlock paid-up phones–and to tell their customers when they’ve unlocked that option–has some serious limits, but it still represents a remarkable reversal of where we were 11 months ago, not to mention five years ago.

12/15/2013: Tips on charging devices with your laptop, USA Today

A reader asked a simple question–how do I know if my laptop will charge my phone when asleep–that did not have a simple answer. The column also includes a reminder to check your laptop’s touchpad settings.

On Sulia, I questioned a dubious cable-industry Web ad campaign, shared details of a conversation I had with FreedomPop’s COO about my tepid review of its service, decried the communication breakdown behind Twitter’s quickly-reversed weakening of its “block” feature, pointed readers to an interesting password-testing site mentioned at NCL’s ID-theft conference, and denounced the idea of Sprint angling to buy T-Mobile.

12/17/2013: Corrected Polis’s bio and added a link to video of the ID-theft panel.