What are Windows Precision drivers? How to check if your laptop uses them? How to enable them? All these questions are discussed in this post. By the way, it is worth trying MiniTool Partition Wizard. It is a safe and professional partition manager for Windows users. With it, you can easily resize partition, upgrade disk, check disk health and speed, etc.
What Are Windows Precision Drivers?
Touchpads showed up in the early 90s and evolved over to the point where they can do more than just point and click. For better touchpad experience on Windows 10 laptops, Microsoft adopt the functionality of the traditional touchpad and developed Precision Touchpad.
Precision Touchpad is a program that improves the standard gestures of the touchpad in the form of a driver. With the program, you can use all Windows 10 gestures, such as multi-finger taps and swipes for shortcuts to everything from promoting Cortana to quickly switching between windows (Alt + Tab not working).
Lots of users claim that the general movement and sensitivity of Microsoft Precision Touchpad experience is better than the standard Synaptics or ELAN drivers, the common touchpad manufactures.
Can You Use Windows Precision Drivers on Your Laptop?
Although your laptop uses Synaptics or Elan drivers, there is a way switch to Precision touchpad drivers because Precision Touchpad laptop and non-Precision Touchpad generally come with the same underlying hardware.
Here is the tutorial on how to check if your laptop uses Microsoft Precision drivers or Synaptics or Elan drivers. Follow it.
Step 1: Right-click the Start menu on the taskbar and then choose the Settings option from the menu.
Step 2: Select the Devices option from the Settings menu and then choose the Touchpad option from the left side.
Step 3: Look at the right side and check if there is a note saying “Your PC has a precision touchpad”. If you see this note, it means your laptop is using Microsoft Precision drivers. If not, there are no Precision Touchpad drivers installed but you can install them by following the tutorial below.
How to Install Windows Precision Drivers?
Here is the tutorial on how to install Windows Precision touchpad drivers.
Step 1: Check whether your laptop adopts a Synaptics or ELAN input device because you need different Precision Touchpad drivers depending on the touchpad your laptop comes with.
- Right-click the Windows icon on the taskbar and then choose the Device Manager
- Expand the Mice and other pointing devices category on the Device Manager window and see if the touchpad belongs to Synaptics or ELAN. If you cannot get any clues from the touchpad name, please double-click the touchpad, and check the information following Manufacture.
Step 2: Download Microsoft Precision Touchpad drivers. After downloading drivers you need, please extract them to a temporary directory on your PC.
- If you are using Synaptics touchpad, please download the set of drivers.
- If you are using ELAN touchpad, please download these drivers.
Step 3: Install the downloaded drivers using Device Manager.
Open Device Manager again if you have closed it.
Right-click your touchpad under the Mice and other pointing devices category and then choose the Update driver option.
Choose the Browser my computer for driver software option.
Choose the Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer option.
Hit the Have Disk button on the next page, click the Browse button on the Install From Disk window.
Find the temporary folder that contains the drivers you have downloaded. Then, select the Autorun.ini file, click OK, and OK again.
Choose Synaptics Pointing Device or ELAN Pointing Device and then click Next.
Click Yes when you receive a warning saying “Install the device driver is not recommended because Windows cannot verify that it is compatible with your hardware…”.
Your system will automatically install the driver. When the process finishes, please restart your laptop to activate the installed drivers.
