How to prevent accidental drag & drop with touchpad on Windows 10

Drag & drop is a great way to copy or move files. Imagine having to use the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+X and the Ctrl+V shortcuts each time you need to copy or move something. Using the context menu options to do this is even more time consuming. You can drag & drop items by clicking and dragging with the mouse keys but also by double-tapping and dragging on the touchpad.

The thing is, with precision touchpads, and their ability to support multi-touch gestures, drag & drop tends to suffer because the touchpad is a bit too sensitive. You can try fiddling with the touchpad sensitivity but if that doesn’t work, you can prevent accidental drag & drop by disabling drag selection on the touchpad.

Disable drag selection on touchpad

Drag selection is a setting that you can enable or disable without turning any other feature off. If you disable drag selection, you’ll find you won’t accidentally drag & drop items when you don’t mean to.

Open the Settings app and go to the Devices group of settings. Select the Touchpad tab, and uncheck the ‘Tap twice and drag to multi-select” option.

After you disable this option, you will have to use the mouse button that come with the touchpad to select items, or you can single tap on an item to select it. Drag & drop will still work once you’ve selected the item.

The tap twice and drag option is basically what causes the items to be accidentally selected in the first place. The touchpad is bit too sensitive so when you’re moving your fingers across it, it tends to recognize it as a double-tap and drag. As mentioned before, you can try changing the sensitivity of the touchpad but there are only four different settings that you can try and if you set the sensitivity to the lowest it will allow, the other gestures may not be recognized as well as they were before. Still, it’s worth a try if you don’t want to disable double tap to select.

If you still can’t find the right balance for your touchpad’s sensitivity, you can try using different drivers. The Windows 10 generic drivers are normally what are installed but you can opt to use the Synaptics drivers. They support precision touchpads too but may offer you better control over its sensitivity and its various gestures. There is also a small possibility that you lose some gestures that Windows 10 supports so you might sacrifice something along the way.

You can also use a mouse with the touchpad if you want to.

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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