This may have happened to you:
You click on a button or menu option and “miss”. Maybe you’re using Fresh Paint and notice that your Surface Pro stylus is drawing just “a little to the left”.
The cause? Your touch inputs are out of calibration.
The touchscreen and pen inputs on your Surface are pretty accurate out of the box so, you may not have seen any problems with this. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future.
Fortunately, it’s an easy fix that you can do in less than two minutes. The same procedure works for Windows 8 and Windows 10 (technically, it works for Windows RT as well but you won’t get a prompt for Pen or Touch Calibration).
Calibrate Touchscreen or Pen input on a Surface
- Search for “calibrate“
- Tap on “Calibrate the screen for pen or touch input“
- The following screen will appear
- Tap on Calibrate. When you do, you’ll get the following window
- The procedure for doing the Pen or touch inputs are similar so select which one you want to calibrate. For this example, I’m going to do Touch Input
- Next you’ll see a screen a lot like the one below (I enlarged the text to make it easier to read)
- Start in the upper left corner and touch (or tap with the pen) the cross-hairs as they appear. There will be 16 in all. If you make a mistake, right-click on the screen to back up and try again
- After you’re done, you’ll get a popup asking if you want to save your configuration. Tap OK
- Repeat for the touch or pen input as needed
That’s it. Hopefully, you won’t need to do this very often but if you do, now you know what to do.
Let me know if this helps you at some point and don’t be afraid to post a comment if you have any questions.
Tim
