New m1330: Turning off Scroll Coasting (Tech)

New m1330: Turning off Scroll Coasting

2008-01-15 22:26 - Tech

So, as mentioned, I recently got a new laptop. (It arrived yesterday.) It came with Vista, and that wasn't gonna happen. So I re-installed XP. Spent more time than I should have, but I was determined to get everything just right, and the SATA drive not natively recognized by a stock XP disk made that tough.

So once XP was installed, getting drivers and software going was a relatively straightforward operation. I was happy, after installing the driver for the trackpad, to find that it supports "chording" both buttons at the same time to act as a third button. That's something I wish my old laptop did. Problem was, it had "scroll coasting" on, and no buttons to control it. It's hard to describe if you haven't seen it yourself, but if you move your finger in a "throw" like motion, such that it is still moving as you lift, then the scrolling continues to coast through the document until you tap again. I'm not used to that, and end up triggering it by accident frequently, finding myself down at the bottom (or up at the top) of the whole document, when I just wanted to move by a page or so.

I had only recently seen this exact behavior from my Mom's new laptop, both using the ubiquitous synaptics touch pads. Long story short, I remote-connected to her laptop, with a driver that did have a checkbox to control the feature, and toggled it on and off. Examining the registry before and after quickly showed a 3 (before, coast off) changing to a 7 (after, coast on). For those who are interested:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2_3\Horizontal Scrolling]
"ConfigFlags"=dword:00000003
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2_3\Vertical Scrolling]
"ConfigFlags"=dword:00000003

I found the exact same registry entries on my new laptop, hurrah! But mine was set to 5, not 7. A bit of quick mental gymnastics showed me that I needed to map to binary: From 0111 (7) to 0011 (3) removes the four bit. So 0101 (5) had to go to 0001 (1). I set it to 1, and kapow! Worked great. Now, if I ever use the GUI again, it might well reset that value, but I know how to fix it now: toggle off the four bit.

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