The Lenovo Y700-14's trackpad is, as Ricky Gervais keeps saying about cellphone carriers as I try to watch the NBA, rubbish. Seriously, it's crud. And coming from a ThinkPad, the drop in quality is pretty stark. Not only do I lose the TrackPoint, I've lost the precise pad and two pairs of discreet mouse buttons.

The worst thing with the Y700 trackpad is the clicking. There are no discreet buttons, and instead it has annoyingly mushy corners that you press for right and left click.

You can turn on tap-to-click for left click, which is a huge improvement when you're not dragging. (Unfortunately, I can't get "double tap and hold to drag" to work, even though it's on  in the control panel.) Even then, you're still stuck clicking the mush for right-clicking.

It's easy to use the control panel to set up "two-finger click" to right click, but you still have to click through that mush with your two fingers to get it to work. That's not great.

To get two-finger tap (vs. click) to right-click, you need to edit the registry. I've tried a few different combination, but this one actually seems to work:

1. Open regedit
2. Goto - HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Alps\Apoint\Gesture
3. Edit 2TapShow set value to 1
4. Edit 2TapSupport set value to 1
5. Edit 2TapSetting set value to decimal 13 (hexadecimal d)
6. Do the same for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Alps\Apoint\Gesture
7. Restart machine

Voila. Enjoy. Thanks heavens. (Btw, I corrected the spelling of "Alps" in step 2.)

I should point out many places claim that you don't have to perform step 6 to get things working, and suggest that 6 only makes it work for every user, not just yourself. But I think, at least with this laptop, you really have to do 6 to get it to work at all. It didn't work until I did, at any rate.

Still stinks to drag, but everything else is bearable to do with the trackpad now. Now if I could just improve the clicky-but-imprecise keyboard too...

EDIT : I'm getting better with tap-taphold-drag. It's not the end of the world, but it's still a poor trackpad.

EDIT 20160926: Looks like the Anniversary Update for Windows 10 broke that setting. When I opened RegEdit, all of the values above were zeroes again, so I'm hopeful, though still a little annoyed it broke on an update. ?? (Another update: No dice. These settings don't seem to work now. ARGH.)

EDIT 20170121: Sorry for all the spam on this post, but I went through the whole bit, both HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_LOCAL_USER, and it is working again. Oh, thank heavens. I had my ThinkPad Compact USB keyboard die this week, so I was back to using the stock "buttons" on the Y700, and they stink... so... badly... Being able to two-finger-tap to right-click makes the box usable again.

EDIT 20180612: This now seems to be done via the control panel for trackpads again. (I get there with "Control Panel" from Windows menu search, Mouse, Change mouse settings, Touch Pad tab, "Click to change the Touch Pad Settings" link, but there's got to be a more direct route.) Select "2-Finger tapping, turn on the "shortcut menu" option, and profit.

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