Acer 5733 touchpad: bottom 1/5 not sensitive

Hi,

I've bought a brand new Acer (Aspire I think) 5733 a couple of days ago - covered by a warranty. I'm pretty happy with it considering the price, yet I was a bit deceived by the display (bright but that's it...) and the somewhat cheap feel of the materials and the look. It is well designed though and works well.

I was also badly surprized to see that it did not support windows XP. I spent some time trying to find the XP drivers in various shoddy places on the net, yet I fell short of finding all of them. I did not want to buy and Install Windows 7, which would have needed a bunch of drivers to be installed anyway. So I downloaded Ubuntu 12 - and virtually all the hardware worked from the first boot! And it boots really fast. Ubuntu has come a long way from being an oddity, an interesting somewhat experimental project to a valid and seducing alternative to other OSes.

The Laptop came preloaded with some Linux distro, MeeGo, I think, but I could not find my way around it at all so I removed it.

Anyway I'm so satisfied with it overall that I almost forgot the little gripe I had with it... On it's first run, it booted MeeGo. At some point the trackpad started acting bizarre. I tapped it (I'm not going to go into details into how gently I tapped it...) and it went completely FUBAR, the mouse stayed stuck on the edge of the screen basically.

So I reboot the laptop and now it works again. Yet I notice that a substancial part of the bottom of the trackpad (above the buttons) is totally insesitive.

That area is about 1.5cm, and makes about 1/5 (a bit more) of the area of the touchpad which I expect to be sensitive to touch.

I thought it might be a driver thing, but the problem remained in Windows XP and now Ubuntu.

I'd like to know if it's normal (I doubt it is though), if I can diagnose it and if there is anything I can do about it myself.

If it's a hardware default, this would be annoying as it is rather minor yet should not be.

 

Likely the touchpad is micro-cracked. It's a hardware issue.

 

Thanks. I was afraid it was one, and am a bit reluctant to go through the whole trouble of giving the laptop back and wait for the repair. But I guess I'll do it. I'll just put the original drive back in - I had replaced it by an SSD (I hope it doesn't void the warranty!) and send it in - hoping it'll be as fast as they promised, and that the laptop will not come back with another defect instead!