Even though most touch pad hardware can support multitouch gestures, drivers were not available and, in fact, many manufacturers disabled the hardware ability on both touch pads and track pads supposedly because of a potential patent issue.

Multitouch allows a user to use two or three fingers to scroll. Since the features were disabled by not supporting them with hardware drivers, the problem was actually easy to fix. But it required users to download a hacked version of their manufacturer’s version of the Synaptic touch pad driver.

Congratulations to HP for finally releasing an updated version of the Synaptic touch pad driver that can unlock the multi-gesture capability in laptops and netbooks as well in older touch pad and track pads whose drivers don’t support multi-touch.

The new driver is designed for the SYN1E18 Synaptic touch pad but can be installed on any computer with a synaptic touch or track pad version 5.30 or later. Download Synaptic s Touch pad Driver 15.0.9.0 for Windows 7 (x86) and 15.0.9.0 for Windows XP to enable mult-itouch on your computer.

Installing the new driver may unlock the following features and is certainly worth trying:

• two-finger scrolling
• two-finger double tap,
• three-finger tap
• three-finger flick
• pinch-to-zoom
• etc

The only downfall is that so far only 32-bit windows XP and windows 7 work with the new driver. It may or may not work on 64-bit systems. Vista users can try the new windows 7 driver. Let us know if it works.