How to improve Surface's touch responsiveness with a simple Registry tweak

When it comes to improving your PC in some way, sometimes simple tweaks are just worth trying. This is the case of a recently uncovered method that allows to make Microsoft Surface tablet more touch responsive by simply modifying the Windows 8 Registry.

The finding appeared at the XDA Developers Forum by user tamarasu, and it involves the modification of a registry key. So far, many people found that the tweak works and it is something easy to do. If you want to give it a try, here are the step-by-step:

Instructions

1. While in the Start screen, do search for regedit, right-click it and click or tap Run as administrator from the app command.

2. Locate the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TouchPrediction

3. Change the Latency value (DWORD) from 8 to 2.

4. Change the SampleTime value (DWORD) from 8 to 2.

touch-prediction-registry key

5. Restart Surface and test.

Warning: While this method is not particularly hard to do, editing the Windows Registry can sometimes be tricky and harmful to your computer. Before making any changes be sure to backup the registry and/or make a full back up of Surface.

Be aware that Microsoft has spent countless hours fine-tuning its tablet and while the community is finding that the tweak indeed helps to increase the touch responsiveness, it could also affect the battery life of the device, even more on power-users, as the XDA forum member, GooDayToDie, points out “the system must poll the touchscreen more often”.

If it works for you too, let us know in the comments, we’d like to know. And I am also curious how this works with any touch-enabled devices running Windows 8; that would be something really interesting.

Source XDA Developers forum | header image Microsoft