I have a colleague who dropped and cracked her Surface screen pretty badly the other day. While the machine is still function normally its touch feature are totally messed up. I couldn’t even hook it on an external monitor to work just like a normal laptop because the interference from the broken touch screen was making the cursor jumping all over the place. There is no way to use a mouse either.
The only way I can think of is find a way to disable the touch feature so I can at least let my colleague to keep using Surface as a normal laptop while waiting for the replacement to arrive.
Obviously, there is no such setting in Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 that lets you do that. So here is what I ended up doing. And it works like a charm.
Go to Device Manager in Control Panel, expand Human Interface Devices section, find a driver called HID-compliant touch screen.
Right-click on it and select Disable. Click Yes to confirm. The touch feature will be disabled right after.
That’s it. I successfully turned a Surface tablet into a regular laptop with a touch screen.