Apple has taken the whole trackpad + gestures thing pretty far, and although you cannot get every Apple gesture on your Windows laptop (easily), you can enable certain convenience features such as two finger scrolling.
Because PC laptop hardware differs greatly among the different manufacturers and specific laptop models, enabling scrolling trackpad gestures may not work for everyone. This tutorial is based on laptops that use Synaptics brand trackpads and drivers. So, to get started, here is how you check to see what type of trackpad your Windows laptop has.
Open the start menu and type mouse in the search box, or navigate Start – Control Panel and locate the mouse settings from there. Once you have the Mouse Properties window open, you can check to see what type of pointing device your laptop utilizes.
At this point, if you are seeing Synaptics, you are good to go. Next, you need to understand that although the drivers for your specific laptop are Synaptics, they are most likely a vendor’s version of Synaptic drivers.
For example, if you have a Dell computer, you have the Dell distribution of Synaptics trackpad drivers, if you have an HP computer, you have the HP distribution of Synaptics trackpad drivers, etc…
These drivers will sometimes and sometimes not support scrolling gestures out of the box. The good thing is, you can just open up your browser and navigate to the Synaptics drivers homepage, which will allow you to download the latest drivers for your trackpad. From there, you can simply use the new drivers instead of the ones that came installed on your laptop.
Once you have downloaded the latest drivers from Synaptics, install them and restart your computer.
After your computer boots back up and you are logged into Windows, again, open up the Mouse Properties window by typing Mouse into the Start Menu search bar, or by navigating to Mouse Properties via Control Panel.
Click the tab labeled Device Settings and click the Settings button within this tab.
Once the next Properties window pops up, click to maximize the Scrolling menu. Then, click the submenu item Two-Finger Scrolling to bring up the two-finger scrolling settings. Click to check Enable Vertical Scrolling and Enable Horizontal Scrolling. You can also optionally check Enable EdgeMotion when scrolling, which makes it so the trackpad keeps scrolling after your fingers near the edge of the trackpad.
**Important Note**
You can also adjust sensitivity settings and other options as well, which may make the gestures and scrolling experience better than what is chosen by default.
That’s all there is to it. All it takes is a driver update from Synaptics to enable scrolling gestures on your Synaptics enabled laptop.
Because PC laptop hardware differs greatly among the different manufacturers and specific laptop models, enabling scrolling trackpad gestures may not work for everyone. This tutorial is based on laptops that use Synaptics brand trackpads and drivers. So, to get started, here is how you check to see what type of trackpad your Windows laptop has.
Open the start menu and type mouse in the search box, or navigate Start – Control Panel and locate the mouse settings from there. Once you have the Mouse Properties window open, you can check to see what type of pointing device your laptop utilizes.
At this point, if you are seeing Synaptics, you are good to go. Next, you need to understand that although the drivers for your specific laptop are Synaptics, they are most likely a vendor’s version of Synaptic drivers.
For example, if you have a Dell computer, you have the Dell distribution of Synaptics trackpad drivers, if you have an HP computer, you have the HP distribution of Synaptics trackpad drivers, etc…
These drivers will sometimes and sometimes not support scrolling gestures out of the box. The good thing is, you can just open up your browser and navigate to the Synaptics drivers homepage, which will allow you to download the latest drivers for your trackpad. From there, you can simply use the new drivers instead of the ones that came installed on your laptop.
Once you have downloaded the latest drivers from Synaptics, install them and restart your computer.
After your computer boots back up and you are logged into Windows, again, open up the Mouse Properties window by typing Mouse into the Start Menu search bar, or by navigating to Mouse Properties via Control Panel.
Click the tab labeled Device Settings and click the Settings button within this tab.
Once the next Properties window pops up, click to maximize the Scrolling menu. Then, click the submenu item Two-Finger Scrolling to bring up the two-finger scrolling settings. Click to check Enable Vertical Scrolling and Enable Horizontal Scrolling. You can also optionally check Enable EdgeMotion when scrolling, which makes it so the trackpad keeps scrolling after your fingers near the edge of the trackpad.
**Important Note**
You can also adjust sensitivity settings and other options as well, which may make the gestures and scrolling experience better than what is chosen by default.
That’s all there is to it. All it takes is a driver update from Synaptics to enable scrolling gestures on your Synaptics enabled laptop.
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