Dell D630 touchpad settings

Is there any way to access more advanced touchpad settings for the Alps touchpad in the Dell D630? Dell has a custom GUI for the touchpad/trackpoint, but it lacks any advanced customization. Looking at the Alps website they have obviously created a more advanced GUI, but it seems Dell opted out of it. In contrast, my T42 has a Synaptics touchpad that has an amazing settings dialog. One of the things I was trying to accomplish was turning off regular touchpad use, while leaving on the virtual scrolling functionality. Alps does not seem to publish a generic driver, instead only rolling custom drivers for manufacturers.

 

Since nobody responded, I did some digging into the driver settings and figured out how to access the Alps GUI. There is a registry key called UseCustomGUI and it defaults to 1(on). Changing this to 0(off) allows you to access the Alps specific tabs under Control Panel -> Mouse. The setting is in 3 places in the registry and the one under Defaults should change it, but you can just change all of them for a blanket effect. I did notice however that if you leave it off, then you will lose the tabs, including the Dell GUI tab, on reboot. This is most likely due to the fact that the driver was packaged specifically to use the Dell GUI. But, since all either GUI does is change registry key values, you can turn the Alps GUI on, make changes, and then turn it off again.

Sadly, the Alps GUI does not offer much more than the Dell GUI. They are very similar, but the Dell GUI is probably a little more user friendly. Specifically, you cannot leave only the touchpad scroll on and turn the rest of the touchpad off. In the future, I will probably avoid notebooks with Alps touchpads in favor of Synaptics.