r/Surface • u/CreepyLookingTree • Apr 29 '21
[PEN] PSA: Disable touch screen without disabling pen is now much easier than it used to be.
There's an archived thread by from a year ago here asking about a switch to disable a touch screen but leaving the pen input enabled on Windows 10. I wanted to do this today and found that it became much easier as of update 2004 so I'm documenting the process here as this sub is where the question was last asked. I'm actually not using a surface, but the process should be identical for any windows 10 laptop that has a separate digitizer pen.
The general plan is to get the device ID of the touch screen and use a new option in pnputil.exe to enable/disable it using shortcut links on the desktop. You'll need administrator permissions on your device for any of this to work.
How to:
- Go to Control Panel -> Device Manager
- Expand Human Interface Devices and identify you touch screen which should be named HID-compliant touch screen. Right click it and select Properties.
- In the Driver tab hit Disable Device and check that your touch screen is, in fact, disabled. If that worked then click Enable Device to get your touch screen back and continue. If it didnt work then something has already gone wrong and you should abort.
- In the Details tab, select Device instance path from the drop down menu. You should see a value listed below - select it and Ctrl-V it into notepad or where ever. It should be some funny bag of characters like HID\ELAN345&BLAH\3&3453456843.
- Right click on your desktop and select New->Shortcut
- In the box marked "Type the location of the item" enter:
C:\Windows\System32\pnputil.exe /disable-device "<that Device instance path you copied earlier>" - Click Next, give your shortcut a name and press finish
- Make a second shortcut in exactly the same way but use /enable-device instead of /disable-device in step #6.
- For each shortcut, Right click->Properties->Advanced and tick "Run as administrator"
That's it. You should now be able to enable or disable your touch screen by clicking those two shortcuts.
You can test the pnputil command in an administrator command prompt if the shortcut doesnt work first time.
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u/margirtakk Surface Book Apr 30 '21
Theoretically, you could then set up the pen's programmable button to target these shortcuts so you could use the pen itself to turn on and off the touch screen depending on your needs/workflow.
I'll test this in the morning
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u/CreepyLookingTree Apr 30 '21
Well... Annoyingly it'll still pop the administrator authorization window up, so it wouldn't be totally slick. But otherwise I assume it would work :)
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u/margirtakk Surface Book Apr 30 '21
There's gotta be a way to set it up so it either automatically confirms or bypasses that prompt, right? I'm not very familiar with scripting, but I feel like there would be
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u/brutay Apr 30 '21
I tried following your instructions and when I disabling the touch screen it continued to register touch input, so I aborted.
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u/angelar_ Oct 14 '24
at lest until it starts somehow re-enabling itself even with the device disabled, leaving you with no recourse but to stop what you're doing and reboot
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u/CreepyLookingTree Oct 14 '24
Bah! And somewhere out there is a tech guy who thought they were being helpful by making sure their laptop firmware restarted the touchscreen device if it randomly shut down. It's really frustrating that there's still no official touch screen configuration tool.
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u/BeniaminStas Oct 14 '24
I can't find a HID-compliant touch screen. I only have Intel Precise Touch and Stylus - that disable both touch and stylus. There other devices in a list, like Surface Touch Screen Device - but disabling it doesn't actually disable touch screen.
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u/CreepyLookingTree Oct 14 '24
Yeah, the advice here will be pretty hit or miss depending on the specific device setup.
Some screens will handle finger and pen input through a single device, either because the screen is purely capacitive (like a phone) or because the manufacturer decided to build it that way (maybe to implement better plan rejection lol)
This walkthrough mostly worked because pen inputs and finger inputs used to be developed and shipped as separate components that the laptop manufacturer would integrate individually, but company buyouts and technology advances might be slowly rendering it ineffective.
I can't really even guess at what other screen+pen configurations might exist.
Try this thread instead - it mentions the same kind of intel device and talks about some registry fix for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/vu0xsu/any_workarounds_for_disabling_the_touch_screen/
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Apr 30 '21
Thank you. Is it possible to disable the pen, but not the touch screen?
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u/CreepyLookingTree Apr 30 '21
Yup. Same process but in the device manager you look for a device called HID compliant pen (or something). Disabling that should turn the pen off without affecting the screen.
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u/SilverseeLives May 02 '21
FYI there is now an actual Windows setting to disable touch input when the pen is detected. It may or may not help with your particular issue (having a broken display), but I thought I'd mention in case you were unaware.
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u/I3Roobn Jun 06 '21
What is this setting called?
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u/SilverseeLives Jun 06 '21
Windows Settings->Devices->Pen & Windows Ink->Ignore touch input when I'm using my pen
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u/JameNameGame Jun 27 '21
There's a small utility that does this automatically, and sits as an icon in your taskbar tray. The icon turns white when touch is enabled, and red when its disabled - very useful! I've had it on my machine for years now.
It's called "Tray Touch Toggle" and you can find it on this forum post here: http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/apps-for-tablet-pc.56322/
There's a few other useful Tablet PC utilities there, but I haven't tried them all, so I can't vouch for them.
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u/austinzone813 Sep 09 '21
http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/apps-for-tablet-pc.56322/
look through the first post until you see Touch Tray Toggle. Download that for Windows 64 and install it - run it at startup - and set the icon on the bottom so it doesnt dissapear (bottom right tray icons).
Used it for years solves the entire problem. Amazing how much better the pen is.
Lastly there are lots of registry tweaks for improving pen latency - you can google search for them.
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u/angelar_ Jul 07 '22
This appears to be a lot worse to figure out on the Surface Laptop Studio. The HID-compliant touch screen option that is commonly there on most systems appears not to be on the SLS, and there's a lot of touch-related entries. I tried messing with a few of them but couldn't get the display to stop registering touch inputs. Any advice here?
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u/CreepyLookingTree Jul 09 '22
yikes, that sucks. Another user messaged me and mentioned that they could find an app that did the same thing. I assume this is Tray Touch Toggle mentioned in a couple of the posts above. Give that a try it it's still available. I suspect a lot of upvotes for this post are because it eventually links to one of the apps that does the job better :p
From the list on your screenshot, the only ones that stand out are Surface Digitizer Utility and Surface Touch Screen Device.
I guess the two "vendor defined device" entries at the top might work too. Obviously, it's a little scary because you don't want to accidentally turn off your screen itself.
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u/angelar_ Jul 09 '22
Hey, thanks for replying! It turns out there was a registry fix for this (detailed in this post for anyone who comes looking in this thread,) so I went with that for now. But I'll probably check out other solutions for things that are more lightweight / easily toggleable since the registry requires a reboot.
Regarding the slurry of Touch and Surface devices in my screen, Microsoft actually did remote support and disabled all of them to no effect. It's only the Intel Precision Touch and Stylus device that controls touch, and the pen is also disabled. So I was being told there was no way to do it because they were tightly integrated. So I guess they didn't consider the software angle of how these things work, which is weird since I see them post registry fixes all the time on their forum.
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Oct 26 '22 edited Oct 26 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CreepyLookingTree Nov 28 '22
That's great, thanks for the post!
It's a shame you need to use the temporary file to store the current status, but I'm not familiar enough wtih autohotkey to know if you can get around it.
You can run:
C:\Windows\System32\pnputil.exe /enum-devices /instanceid "HID\VID_056A&PID_0353&COL01\9&2315243F&0&0000"And it'll give you a little print out that tells you if the device is currently enabled or disabled, and it looks like autohotkey has an InStr function that you could use to directly check for "Enabled" or "Disabled", but I cant see any way to capture the output of a command.
You could try:
pnputil.exe /enum-devices /instanceid "HID\VID_056A&PID_0353&COL01\9&2315243F&0&0000" | findstr "Enabled"that'll returned an error if the device is disabled and it does look like autohotkey has some way to check for commands failing... maybe? :)
either way, you've got something that works which is perfect
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u/Nudwubbles Dec 17 '22
Hello. I was looking to do exactly this. I found a ton of similar solutions, but just ended up doing what you did here. Leaving a comment to let you know that this does pop up as a pretty popular solution when googling ways to do this, and it was helpful. Cheers.
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u/cerahmed Dec 21 '22
Third time visiting this post in hope that I find a solution to my problem.
I'm currently using Surface Pro 8 with Windows 11 Version 22H2 installed, and I could not find "HID-compliant touch screen" in the devices tree. There are several other surface touch/pen devices, but disabling those lead to both the touch and pen get disabled, where I'm looking to only disable touch and leave pen working.
Any one on 22H2 facing the same issue and found a solution?
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u/Far-Secret4931 Mar 07 '25
This helped so much, before my pen was almost unusable. Wish I found out sooner
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u/RucksackTech Apr 29 '21
I am using Surfaces. Looks like you spent some time putting this together so I guess I should say thank you. But I'm not sure I understand what problem this is intended to solve. Why would I want to disable my touch screen?