Enable or Disable Touch by Finger on Touch Screen in Windows 11

What is a Touchscreen?

A touchscreen lets you use your fingers, as you would on a phone or tablet, to tap, swipe and interact with your computer instead of using a mouse or keyboard.

If your laptop, tablet or PC has a touchscreen, you can turn off touch input from your fingers. Other input methods, such as a stylus pen, a mouse or a keyboard, keep working.

Why Would You Want to Do This?

There are a few common reasons to turn off finger touch:

• You use a stylus and want to stop accidental touches from your palm or fingers.
• You prefer a keyboard and mouse, and the screen gets bumped or smudged while you work.
• The touchscreen is misbehaving, for example registering “ghost” touches, and you need to stop it until it is fixed.

What Happens When You Change This?

With finger touch disabled in Windows 11, the screen no longer responds to your fingers. A stylus pen still works.

Touch still works there.

Finger touch is on by default on Windows 11 touchscreens. You can use it straight away with no setup, and you only need to change anything if you want to turn it off.

How to Disable Touch by Finger

This method uses a command that writes a value to the registry, which controls how the screen responds to touch. It works the same on Windows 11 Home and Pro. You need an administrator account.

1. Press the Windows key + R to open the Run box.
2. Type regedit and press Enter. %%SC0%%
3. ⚠️ ADMIN REQUIRED: If a User Account Control prompt appears, click Yes. If you are not signed in as an administrator, you will be asked for an administrator password. Without admin rights, the change will not be applied.
4. Open Command Prompt as administrator if it is not already open. Search for Command Prompt in the Start menu, right-click it and choose Run as administrator. You should see a window titled Administrator: Command Prompt.
5. Run this command in that window: reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch" /v TouchGate /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f. If it worked, the window reports that the operation completed successfully.
6. Restart your PC. The change does not take effect until you do.

After the restart, try tapping the screen. It should no longer respond to your fingers. If it still does, check that the command reported success and that you ran it from an elevated window.

How to Enable Touch by Finger Again

The command must run as administrator. If you see "Access is denied", close the window and reopen Command Prompt with Run as administrator. Once it succeeds, touch input is restored so you can use your finger directly on the screen.

reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch" /v TouchGate /f

Restart your PC so the change takes effect. After you sign in, tap the screen to confirm that touch is working again.

Important Tips

• Editing the Windows Registry changes how your computer works. Be careful and follow the steps exactly.
• If you're not comfortable editing the registry, ask someone for help.
• This change only affects your user account. Other users on the same PC won't be affected.
• If you make a mistake, you can undo it by running the enable command.

Need More Help?

Microsoft Support

How to Disable Touchscreen on Windows 10/11 (Laptop Mag Tutorial)

Summary

You can easily turn off finger touch on your Windows 11 touchscreen, keeping your stylus pen functional, by using a registry command.