Apple's Magic Trackpad on a Windows 7 desktop

I use a Mac at work but I'm still a PC at home. One of the things I like about the MacBook Pro is its amazing trackpad. It's not the multitouch capabilities - any PC laptop today has a multitouch trackpad - but the incredible responsiveness. The trackpads on most PCs are tiny and require too much concentration to use, while the MBP trackpad is nice and big, and practically effortless to use.

Apple released the Magic Trackpad a while back, which is basically an external, bluetooth version of the MBP's built-in trackpad. I immediately wanted it for my home machine... but I've got a PC. No matter, some googling revealed that it apparently installs fine on Windows 7, so I added it to my Amazon wishlist, and thanks to a super awesome sister, I had it in my hands today.

Connecting it to my Win7 64-bit desktop was a breeze (drivers installed automatically), however, I discovered a major caveat. Although I was able to move the pointer around and click/double-click by pressing down on the trackpad, tapping or double-tapping did nothing, and multitouch wasn't supported either. Ten more minutes of googling found the answer.

The following steps got me tapping and two finger scrolling:

1. I uninstalled the trackpad before proceeding (not sure if that's necessary, but I wanted to start with a clean slate).
2. I installed the "Trackpad-Driver-Installer-12.exe" file from the following web page:
   http://www.trackpadcontrol.com/download.html
   
   What this amazing file does is download and install BootCamp on your computer (even if it's a standalone PC, didn't know you could do that), just so that it can extract the trackpad driver to your system, which it does automatically.
3. Once you've installed the driver, connect the trackpad to your system. For novices:
   - Click Start and type "add".
   - Select "Add a Bluetooth device" from the search results.
   - When the "Add" dialog appears, turn on your trackpad.
   - When the dialog finds the trackpad, follow the prompts.

At this point, tapping and scrolling just worked. The instructions on the download page will have you install the "Magic Trackpad Control Panel", but that doesn't seem to be necessary for tap and scroll, which is all I want. The Control Panel is time-limited payware (but it's only eight bucks if you want it), however, the Trackpad Driver-Installer in the instructions above is free.

So to sum up, with a single executable that does all the installation for you, you get:

• Single finger tap to click
• Single-finger double-tap to double-click
• Two-finger tap to right-click
• Two-finger swipe to scroll.

An interesting caveat to scrolling I just discovered:

• If you have (only) a vertical scroll bar, swiping up and down with two fingers scrolls vertically.
• If you have both vertical and horizontal scroll bars, swiping vertically and horizontally works as expected.
• If you have (only) a horizontal scroll bar, swiping left and right does... nothing. However, swiping up and down does scroll horizontally. So there you go.