 This video is part of a series that I'm trying to get this laptop working for some family members my sister-in-law Which getting it working in Linux no problem windows has been a little more difficult because of the poor design The problem with the computer is that it's physically cracked down here in the corner And that's causing the touchscreen to go haywire Meaning you can't click on anything you can't do stuff keyboard wise because even if I can open up a program Using keyboard shortcuts I can't work inside those programs because it's constantly clicking down in the bottom corner here as you can see it's Flipping everything all around so how can I disable a touchscreen in windows without using the GUI and really there's no Text interface that I know of that I can get to in windows And even the few things I've seen online you have to go into the GUI to enable the text mode And even then they're not really text mode so how can we Fix this well the answer is I I've done some googling and I have found the registry key that Enables touchscreen support so now that I know what key is the proper registry key that I can change the settings of From enabled which is one to zero which is disabled How can I do that when I can't get into reg edit on the windows machine? Well the way I look at it I have two options I can write myself an executable code that edits the registry and set that to run at start sign by going into linux copying the executable I made to the computer and adding it to the startup files or adding it to a shortcut key that I can run Once windows is started or I can just edit the registry from within Linux That's what I'm going to do instead of creating an executable that I'm going to copy over in Linux I'm actually just going to go right in and edit the registry within Linux So first thing I need to do is boot into Linux so again because I can't even get into the interface I'm going to have to hold down the power button until it shuts down completely there we go and then I will take my USB stick with a multi boot has a few different versions of links on there. It doesn't really matter what version and Then I'll go ahead and boot into Linux So the first few steps here in Linux or what I've done in the previous videos controlled F1 and then I'm going to sudo nano into usr share capital x11 x org config dot d and 10 dash Evie dev.config I'm going to go down to where the touch screen is and add in our option for ignore Now that's done. I can go back into my GUI interface And restart control backspace and in this particular case or or just kill it from the shell And here with Linux Mint it will boot back in or log back in in 10 seconds Now I'm going to connect to my network Because I have to install a couple of tools so type in my super secret Password there catchphrase whatever up passphrase catchphrase okay So now Okay, here. I am I SSH'd into the machine from my desktop machine just so I can screen record this a little bit better So now that we've done this we can now sudo aptitude or apt to get depending on what distro using what you have installed But we'll say install and the program we want to all is called change NT or chnt pw And we'll go ahead and install that it's a small program that allows you to do two main things edit the windows registry from Linux and also Clear out passwords for Windows users, which is also very useful. So now that I've done that now I need to mount My windows partition and I'm probably going to get an error the first time around here. So I'm sudo mount Dev SD a5 in my case. I was not to MNT It's gonna say that it can only mount is read only because it wasn't shut down properly I've explained this about the hibernation and fast restart and windows. We can easily fix that with sudo NTFS fix device SD a 5 and now I can mount that drive So now that it's mounted I got to move to the directory where all the registry files are saved So I'm going to CD to MNT windows And then it's system 32 Config so here are all your files that make up your registry and we want to go into the software one So I am now going to use change NT chnt pw Dash e for edit the registry of the software file and it is case sensitive here So if it's all capitals when you list it out, then it's all capitals to get into it next I can list out what keys are available and we want to go into Microsoft So we will CD Microsoft again case sensitive and CD Wisp which you can list out again if you need to but right there is what we want So a CD into Wisp with the capital W in my case and we'll list out and then we can go into CD touch And we have two things here and the second one is touch gate. It's set to one so here we can edit it and We are going to use the command. I forget the question mark. I think it's yeah, Ed Ed touch gate oops We'll hit enter tells you the old value. I'm just gonna hit zero hit enter and I'm gonna hit Q It'll ask if I want to write the hive file Which means nothing has been changed yet as soon as you write this you're making changes and again Be careful when editing the registry and now that we've done that we can reboot our machine So now we're just waiting for the fit machine to finish booting now You'll notice at this point if you look down here You probably can't see in the camera, but it's already the mouse still clicking down there Do not worry because once the desktop is loaded it will change those settings and the cursor will be disabled We just have to now wait for windows to finish booting, which of course always takes a couple of minutes I'll pause the video here We are a couple of minutes into the boot process still here There we go So the desktop is done loading and as you can see our touchscreen no longer works because we disabled it Which is what we were trying to do, but I can now move the cursor with the mouse pad or external mouse And the system is once again usable So it took me a while to figure out how to do this unlike Linux where it's designed to be able to be fixed I guess Windows is very limited in its capabilities because it's so poorly designed in that it doesn't even have a tech space Interface anymore hasn't for about 15 years probably a little bit more than that So when you have issues like this, there's no way to fix it and unlike Linux where I just boot in and change a simple text file to change settings Everything in Windows is almost all done through the registry, which is a number of databases that are just bloatware And a poor way to store data, but luckily thanks to CH NTPW we are able to edit the registry from Windows. That's one way of doing it I believe I've read that you can also use wine to go into the reg edit, but that seems like overkill to me again This was one option. I'm pretty sure I could have wrote in a little C application That executed and changed that value at boot time on the Windows machine But that would have been a trial and error like I would have written written the code Put booted into Linux copied the file over added it to the startup If I wrote it right when I route when I rebooted it would have worked if I had typed something wrong It didn't work then it I would have to go through the whole process again where this way I was able to just go right into the registry as long as I knew what file I had to go into and it took me a few attempts to Because there's a number of files that make up the registry But I look through three or four of them before I picked the right one. It was the software one Microsoft Wisp touch and then just change the value in there from one to a zero And you have disabled the touch interface on your Windows machine again always take care when you're editing registry Either from Windows or Linux change the wrong key You can mess up the system because everything on a Windows system is dependent on that registry So it's unlike Linux where you can if you screw up one of the config files you can usually just delete that config file and it will reload it with the defaults and You don't have to really worry too much about that on Windows. It's a completely different case because Like again so much dependent on that database of the registry and if you screw up the wrong thing You've screwed up your whole system and there's no just delete it and hope the default, you know comes back in So again take care, but I just thought I'd share this little adventure with you again I really could care less about getting the Windows machine working again. I'm doing it for for in-laws And obviously they'd be better off going with something other than Windows and I almost didn't want to put the effort into To fixing the Windows machine because I was able to fix it in 30 seconds in Linux but I took it as a challenge and Again, it took me a little while. I tried, you know different approaches googling stuff and I'd never actually found an actual way to do what I'm doing Directly, but I found enough key little points to to Try different things and again the registry key was the way to go for me If you have another way that you can think of doing something like this. Let me know remember that the Windows interface was completely unusable so Let me know what you think in the comments Do you know of another way to get into a text mode on Windows without going into the GUI first that the touchscreen wouldn't Interface the touchscreen wouldn't mess up your interface that you actually type commands and make modifications Do you know of another way to disable the touchscreen? I read online a few different Commands you could run and I tried those In a roundabout way and they didn't seem to work for me, but the registry Did seem to work and I figured there was a setting in registry because again Everything is dependent on that registry in a Windows system. So anyway, I think I've talked enough Comment below. Let me know what you think be sure to like subscribe and share And I hope that you enjoyed this video Please visit my website films by Chris comm that's Chris the K and again Hopefully you've already watched the previous videos on this project because I kind of skimmed over some stuff in this video That we went over in detail in the previous videos, but I thank you for watching and as always I hope that you have a great day