Dell E6400/E6500/M4400 Touchpad Tap Zones

I can't remember where I read it but somebody mentioned that on some of the older versions of the Dell ALPS Touchpad drivers there were more options available. Anybody know which version, if any, had support for tap zones in the corners or for browser back/forward swipe zones?

I tried the latest Toshiba drivers and the driver lets you configure these zones but for some reason it doesn't work. Horizontal scroll didn't work either on the Toshiba drivers but a feature I can only describe as "typing palm guard" works on the Toshiba version even though the Dell drivers don't have support for it. So this suggests to me there are more options available that the ALPS hardware on our machines can support than provided by the Dell drivers.

On the Dell drivers when you type and graze your palm against the pad you can inadvertently move your cursor, select text in a random area, or accidentally lose focus from the edit box. With the Toshiba driver it disables the touchpad as you type so that these mistakes can't happen and you can graze or even rest your palm on the touchpad surface.

Anyhow, a link to any old versions of an ALPS driver that works on Dell with tap zones, browser swipe regions, and "typing palm guard" would be appreciated.

 

The latest (A09) driver supports the chiral scrolling, which is very useful once you get used to it. Maybe the tap zones went when the chiral scrolling arrived. I not noticed any problems with this driver but previously had some of the problems you describe such as unwanted text selection.

I believe that the touchcheck option should help prevent unwanted text selection. Make sure you have it enabled and try some different settings. Also, disable the pointing stick if you don't use it. Accidentally touching it could also have unwanted side effects.

John

 

Thanks for the tips John. I disabled the pointing stick like you suggested and have bumped the touchcheck a notch up from the default. I am having much less side effects as a result so things have improved while typing. It's not perfect, but it's better than before. I tried maximum touchcheck too but it seemed to lose a lot of my taps when I wanted to tap left click, even when bumping the tapping sensitivity all the way down to light, so I can't use it on maximum.

One thing I should correct myself on is that I thought horizontal scroll didn't work with the Toshiba driver, but I think this might just be a Firefox issue. I'm on the latest Dell driver and although I get the horizontal cursor when I do the horizontal scrolling motion, Firefox won't scroll horizontally for some reason. If this is the case the Toshiba driver might actually be better overall.

Toshiba's palm guard slider uses "better" logic. When you start typing, it appears to start a timer and completely disables all touchpad input until that timer ends. The slider lets you control the duration and each keypress resets the timer. When the timer ends, if your palm is already resting on the pad it ignores your palm until you lift it off and press it down again.

Dell's touchcheck doesn't seem to be timer based. I think it's pressure based and haven't figured out the logic it uses yet, but it's not as good as the Toshiba logic.

Anyhow, I found the post I was referring to before, and this gives me hope I might find a driver with tap zone support:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=7121&view=findpost&p=89352

From that link, here's the relevant quote which gives me some hope:

"The problem with the newest dell touchpad drivers is that they've incorporated their god-awful GUI and seem to have eliminated tap zones. I recently had to replace my HD in my Latitude D820 and I can no longer use the Dell driver to tap the top corner of my touchpad to emulate a middle mouse click, I'm hoping the older versions of the driver will revert back to before they used Dell's GUI."

 

To unlock the native touchpad features which are masked by Dell's software:

1. Go to control panel and select MOUSE to see what options are available (very few) and close that all up.

2. Next click on the Windows Start icon and type regedit in the search box.
Windows Registry will open.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\Alps\Apoint and look for the key; (it's the 2nd to last entry on the list)

UseCustomGUI

Change the value from 1 to 0 and click on OK

3. Next minimize the registry (don't close it yet).
Goto Control Panel and select MOUSE.
Now all the ALPs settings are unlocked and appear here.

For example the GESTURES feature is now showing.
Select GESTURES tab and check ON the box for
Use Back/Forward Buttons.
Then click APPLY and OK.
Close the Mouse settings and close the Control panel.

4. Now go back to your registry setting and change
UseCustomGUI back to it's original value of 1 and close it and the reg editor.

Everything is back exactly as it was but the feature remains enabled.

All done....now when your surfing just swipe your finger along the top edge of the touch pad to go back and forward.

 

Wow that's amazing and it worked! I just tested it in Internet Explorer and could swipe back and forth for browser navigation. Your registry trick even enabled the "palm guard delay timer" slider I was talking about.

The funny thing is that the swipes don't work in Firefox, at least the version 3.1 beta 3 I'm using right now. Maybe all this time when I thought the Toshiba drivers weren't working was because I was testing it in Firefox instead of IE. Maybe the Toshiba drivers do work perfectly after all.

Your registry trick even enabled the tap zones. But unlike the Toshiba drivers the things you can select for the tap zones is quite limited. For instance, with the Dell drivers and the registry hack you can't set any of the tap zones to do a web browser back/forward command. The Dell drivers only give about 5 options. The Toshiba drivers give like 30.

Thanks for the great help. This is exactly what I was looking for!

 

Just to make sure it wasn't a Firefox specific problem I just downloaded and installed the latest Google Chrome 2.0 beta. The horizontal scroll and browser swipes don't work under Chrome either.

Is anybody able to confirm if at least horizontal scrolling works on their version of Firefox or Chrome with the Dell drivers? If so what OS and driver version are you using?

I wonder if this problem is due to my OS. I'm using Windows 7 beta (build 7000) 32 bit edition.

 

MiB -

Pardon the off-model post, but I was wondering if you know of similar registry edits for unlocking touchpad features for Dell's Synaptic touchpads (i.e. not Alps)?

I just bought a Studio XPS 1340, and the Dell driver has some cool new features like Pinch and "Churl?" for scrolling - but removes basic Synaptic things I've come to expect like programmable tap zones!

any help is appreciated.

 

I can remember that back when Firefox was stil very, very unknown (and had a different name), the back and forward buttons of Logitech mice didn't work in Firefox, until Logitech somewhen released a driver with support for Firefox.

I have no idea what the exact problem is, but if you can assign a key combination to the tap zones, you could set them to "Alt+left key", which means "go back".

 

Here is your solution:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4668946&postcount=27 (look for the following, bold text: "FIREFOX SUPPORT FOR ALPS TRACKPAD GESTURES")

Edit: Uhm, okay... it was yourself writing that, I got that now... lol... stupid me

 

Now that was hilarious. Funny stuff, you almost made me spit my drink on my monitor

When I researched the problem it seems to be that a lot of touchpad/mouse drivers have some really sloppy hacks in them to support those back/forward commands. The ALPS drivers for the Dell Latitudes specifically look for text in the titlebars of browsers. For some reason it's looking for the word " Netscape" with the leading space, even though I don't really know anybody who still uses that age old browser.

I'm not sure why they just can't send the back/forward command to any window selected - maybe there's a technical reason they didn't do that.

As for the touchpad zones being set to keyboard shortcuts, unfortunately the Dell one even with MiB's registry trick doesn't support assigning them to keyboard commands.

The Toshiba drivers support a lot more zone commands than the Dell drivers but I haven't been able to get tap zones working with the Toshiba driver.