Aspire 5520G touchpad & BIOS issue

I've just picked up an Aspire 5520G (love me, AMD ) and despite two days of hunting, I still haven't found the answer to two questions:

1) How the bloody hell do you turn on the touchpad?

2) Hoping that there's something buried away in the BIOS that might help me solve #1, I found & downloaded the service manual. In it, on page 39 at the very beginning of Chapter 2, "BIOS Setup Utility" it says:

Code:

To activate the BIOS Utility, press m during POST (when “Press <F2> to enter Setup” message is prompted on the bottom of screen).

(and the 'm' is in bold and a different font, but there's no reference to anything special about this odd-looking 'm')

Pressing the "m" key during the POST does nothing except make it go BEEP! (really loudly!).

The service manual also has extra screens listed in its Phoenix BIOS: Information, Main, Advanced, Memory, Security, Boot, Power, Exit. There is also detailed explanations for each page and the settings on each page. Under 'Advanced' there is "USB Self Healing" and, most importantly, "Integrated Devices" sub-pages.

It came with V1.08 of the BIOS and I have tried all the officially available versions from the Acer site, and all of them have only Information, Main, Security, Boot and Exit.

How the bloody 'ell does one get at these hidden features of the BIOS? I've been poking the web for answers for a couple of days now almost non-stop, and this thread is the closest I've come to a possible answer.

Please, Obi Kizwan Kenobe, you're my only hope!

 

Moved it to a separate thread.

Did you try Fn+F7 to enable touchpad and F2 at boot for entering BIOS setup?

 

Oh, this is where it ended up!

Yes and yes. I even disassembled the beastie to make sure the touchpad was in its rightful position and properly connected to the motherboard. (I'm no stranger to laptops' innards, been a tech for thirty years).

I've tried a factory restore to Vista, a UBCD4WIN disc, a platform-neutered Win7 on a separate hard drive, they all see the ALPS 'pad as present and functioning properly, but neither the pad nor the buttons do diddly-squat. F7 or Fn+F7 don't do anything either to the touchpad.

Tis why I was hoping there was something I'd overlooked or something Acer didn't adequately describe that allowed one to reach the inner bowels of the BIOS. F2 at POST just gives me four very basic menus, I can set the date and time, and the boot order, and very little else.

 

Sorry- that basic menus are exactly how notebook BIOSes look like.
You can see if kizwan had already modified BIOS for your notebook or submit a request for such a BIOS if he had not but I've never seen any touchpad related options in BIOS.
BTW do you have Launch Manager installed?

 

It turns out kizwan had tweaked a 5520 BIOS, which I tried, but I had to revert via crisis recovery. Funnily enough, this seems to have been what was necessary to wake the touchpad up, because it now works, and Fn+F7 toggles it on & off like it's meant to.

Definitely a headscratcher, but at least the issue has been solved ... albeit in a rather drastic and roundabout manner!