# [Tutorial] Elan Touchpad Disable Palm Tracking



## lukeman3000

For those of you who have an Elan touchpad along with the latest drivers, you may be frustrated that you can't figure out how to disable the "palm tracking" feature, which automatically disables the touchpad whenever a key is pressed.

Through a little investigative research, I have found that it is, in fact, possible to disable palm tracking, but it takes a couple registry tweaks. So, I have created two .reg files -- one that enables palm tracking and one that disables it. The files have been attached to this post, and are also available to be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/?1d5gyop026rcfux

In order for the registry changes to take effect, you either need to restart your laptop, or simply stop, and then enable the touchpad itself. You can do this through "Mouse" menu:

1. Hit win+R
2. Type "control main.cpl" (without quotes) and hit enter
3. Select the "Touchpad" tab at the top of the Mouse Properties window
4. Make sure "Elan Smart-Pad" device is selected (or whatever it may be called)
5. Click "Stop Device"
6. Click "Enable Device"

The touchpad has been restarted, and the registry changes have now taken effect

The above sequence is, generally, much faster than a restart, but keep in mind that you must do steps 1-6 after running either of the .reg files for them to take effect if you choose to do this instead of restarting your laptop (I would recommend steps 1-6 because it is much faster).

If fact, one could automate this whole process even more by creating an autohotkey script to automatically run the appropriate .reg file and then restart the touchpad, but I'm too lazy to do that and, frankly, I don't turn palm tracking on and off at a high enough frequency where it would save me a lot of time to create a script for it.

I hope that some find this useful. It would be nice if Elan wouldn't remove features like this from their driver. It obviously still exists in the registry, so why not let me tweak it from the GUI menu? I don't get it.


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## ekim68

Thanks....:up: I've encountered a couple of those...:up:


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