Scripting Dell TouchPad configurations

Posted on July 14, 2011 Updated on November 19, 2011

We recently received the new Dell E6320 and E6420 laptops.  After deployment of our standard image, which does not contain drivers, we package the full driver installers as provided by the manufacturer.  We found that for these new laptops, scrolling was not automatically enabled for the TouchPad’s.  I would say scrolling is a defacto usability standard.  To enable scrolling for the TouchPad, simply set the following in the registry:

Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Alps\Apoint\Button
Value Name: EnableWheel (dword)
Value: 33

Once a user logs into Windows for the first time, the values in HKLM are then sucked into HKCU.  In this way, scrolling is enabled by default but not enforced upon the user.