For those with an Asus UX31A laptop and Windows 8 – you’ve probably been either extremely happy with your touchpad so far, or extremely disappointed – and for good reason! I’ve installed countless different touchpad drivers for this laptop – each one with such drastically polarizing results.

Either way, regardless if you’re in the happy or sad camp with your current touchpad drivers – this post should still be useful to you. My specific laptop model is the Asus UX31A-BHI5T11. This is the touchscreen version of the Asus Zenbook UX31A. I believe this post only applies to the UX31A laptops with the Elan touchpad.

1. Sad Campers – let’s get your drivers updated to the best ones out there! From my experience, the best ones are the GENERIC Elan touchpad drivers provided by Asus. They can be found here: http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=Touchpad&p=3&s=110
2. Choose your OS version an download! I’m personally using the version 11.5.12.1. The filename for the download was Touchpad_Elantech_Win81_64_VER115121.zip.
3. To confirm you have good drivers installed – try moving the cursor around and try two-finger scroll on the start screen or in a web browser. It should be smooth and fluid. Now that you have a usable touchpad, let’s continue on to some tweaks.
4. Happy Campers – since you’re probably already using good touchpad drivers, you probably just want to tweak your touchpad a bit to get the best touchpad out there. How? Registry editing!
5. Hit CTRL+R, then type “regedit” and click OK.
6. Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Elantech\SmartPad
7. At this point, you can start editing keys that you want by using this handy guide: http://pastebin.com/m51ekHCp – this guide shows you all the “functions” you can assign to a gesture or tap.
8. For example, if you want to make a three-finger-upward-gesture maximize the current window, you would edit:
   1. ThreeFingerMoveUp_Enable – set this to “1” to enable this gesture
   2. ThreeFingerMoveUp_Func – set this to “5” to assign the Maximize Window function to it.
   3. Note – make sure you switch the Base to Decimal instead of He when editing functions.
9. After you make the edits you want, reboot your computer and it should be active!

For those who want an easy way out, I have mine customized as the following:

• Three-Finger Click is set to “Middle Click”
• Three-Finger Up gesture is “Maximize Window”
• Three-Finger Left/Right is “Forward/Back”
• Four-Finger Down gesture is “Show/Hide Start screen”

If you like my settings, you can just import my registry keys from here.