Windows laptops often let you tap one or more fingers on the touchpad or trackpad to click. If this gets in your way, you can disable it—or enable it if it’s not working.
Different Laptops Have the Option in Different Places
Generally, you can tap with one finger to left-click and tap with two fingers to right-click. This option is relatively easy to enable and disable, although it’s in different places depending on the touchpad hardware your laptop manufacturer included and how they configured it. If you disable tap-to-click, you can still click by depressing the trackpad or pressing the buttons on it.
Many modern Windows laptops have Precision Touchpads. If your laptop does, you can configure tap-to-click and other touchpad settings directly in Windows 10’s Settings app.
How to Disable or Enable Tap to Click
To check whether these features are available on your PC, head to Settings > Devices > Touchpad. (You can quickly open the Settings app by pressing Windows+i on your keyboard.)
Under Taps, enable or disable the “Tap with a single finger to single-click,” “Tap with two fingers to right-click,” and “Tap twice and drag to multi-select” options. The exact options available will depend on your PC. But, if you don’t see them, your PC doesn’t have a Precision Touchpad, and these options must be configured elsewhere.
If you don’t see the options here, you can likely click “Additional settings” under Related Settings on the Touchpad settings pane.
This will generally open your touchpad’s settings panel in the old Mouse Properties window.
On an HP laptop with a Synaptics touchpad, it took us to the “ClickPad Settings” pane. We could click “ClickPad Settings” to access the touchpad’s settings.
(You can also find these options by heading to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Mouse and looking for the touchpad options your laptop’s touchpad drivers added to this window. This is where you’ll find them on Windows 7 PCs.)
We could then entirely disable “Tapping,” or disable “Two-Finger Tap,” “Three-Finger Tap,” or “Four-Finger Tap.” Finally, we could save the settings by clicking “OK” twice.
Again, the exact options available, as well as the name of any settings here, will depend on your laptop manufacturer, how it configured your touchpad, and the drivers it used. While many laptops have Synaptics touchpads and will look similar to this, some have ELAN trackpads.
In some cases, some laptops may not even offer an option that lets you disable tap-to-click. However, most laptops do offer this option.