Elitebook 840 G4 Disable Palm Detect / Palm Check

[Reem25]

Like many of you out there I've been scouring google, forums, and youtube videos for days, to no avail, trying to figure out how to disable palm detect / palm check to do things like play games or whatever you might need to use the keyboard and touchpad at the same time efficiently for.

At last I have found a fix that has worked for me and has no delay or stuttering.

First I'd like to start of with what I was running:

Elite Book 840 G4

OS: W10 Pro 64 22H2

Original Touchpad Driver: Synaptics SMBus Touchpad 19.3.8.32 Rev A (Latest driver availble from HP)

Issue: Want to disable palm detect but there is no touchpad settings in Synaptics control panel and "Most Senstive" under Tap Sensitivty

does not disable palm detect.

Now going into the registry and editing all the 'PalmKms' under Computer\HKEY\LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTp\Defaults

made improvements. However this still left me with small delays after holding a key and inconsistent behavior. 

I tried changing all the PalmDetectConfig entries to 0 as well but this actually made things worse together with the previous entries.

I did realize if you roll back to the Microsoft driver palm detect will be disabled with the 'Most Sensitive' setting but you will lose some functionality of the touchpad if you care about some of those small features. (I did)

So what I decided to do next was keep trying older drivers to see if this was not an issue in previous versions and I found one that completely

 disables palm check with a few registry edits and retain some of the extra features the Synaptics driver provided.

Driver version I downloaded from HPs website was Synaptics Mouse Driver 19.3.8.25. If you click 'view all details' on the mouse driver when you're on the main list of drivers it will take you to another page. Scroll Down click revision history and scroll down some more. You will see info about each revision and at the bottom of the page downloads for each one.

After downloaded you will then want to uninstall the current touchpad driver from Add/Remove programs and restart windows. Then install the 19.3.8.25 driver. Windows will restart again. (Quick note after this restart double tap to disable was not functioning but not to worry because the restart after the next steps will fix that)

Next in the Windows Touchpad settings ( Settings > Bluetooth and Devices) set the Tap Senstivity to ' Most Sensitive'.

Then you're going to change the PalmDetectConfig entry to 0 (using WIN + R then regedit) in these 3 locations:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPad

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2_2TM3139

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadSMB2cTM3139

Then restart your computer one more time and done. Touchpad should be functioning all normal and nifty with palm detect disabled ;).

Hope this helps you out if you're having this issue and if you're on similar or even different machines maybe its worth checking with your laptop manufacturer on older driver versions if you are already on a newer version.