At some point you may want to disable the touch screen to strictly use your Windows 8 tablet/laptop as a PC with the classic mouse and keyboard combo. There’s no built-in option to turn off the touch screen, but Into Windows has a quick workaround.
Here are the steps:
- First, go to the device the manager by opening the “Charm Menu” and search for “Device Manager”. If you don’t see it, change the search filter to “Settings”.
- Once in the Device Manager, expand the tab showing your computer name. Then find “Human Interface Devices” and expand it.
- You should see several “HID-compliant device” listings. Some PCs will call it an HID-Compliant Touch Screen, but yours may vary — if you don’t have a touch screen option, you may have to try each HID Compliant ____ until one works. When asked if you want to disable the device, select “yes”. That’s it! The touch screen on your Windows 8 device should be disabled.
To enable it again, just follow the same steps, but select “enable” instead. One important thing to remember: Once the touch is disabled, you’ll need a keyboard and mouse paired with the device to undo it.
How to Quickly Disable Touch Screen Input in Windows 8.1 [Into Windows]
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5 responses to “Disable Your Laptop’s Touch Screen In Windows 8.1”
I’m trying to think of an actual reason you would need to do this…? You can still use the mouse without disabling the touch screen..!
When grandma comes over and you show her something and she inevitably goes to point at it on the screen.
I agree that there isn’t a reason to disable the touchscreen on a suitably-equipped laptop because you can simply use this for “coarse” navigation like bringing up tabs on a browser or answering dialog boxes whereas the mouse would work for “fine” navigation like pointing to text in a document for example.
Had to do this the other day actually – my girlfriend cracked the digitizer on her laptop and it was freaking out something bad. Now to get a new digitizer, that’ll be a fun swapout…
The real question is – will this save battery?