Touchpad on TM 8204

Hi
I've had my TM 8204 for nearly 8 months now, all this time mostly using a bluetooth mouse with it, never paying the touchpad any special attention. The other day I had to use it as the batteries in the mouse got flat and when I kept pressing this central button with a round depression in it which I guess is supposed to be a four-way navigator nothing at all happened in whatever application I tried to get any response from it. The touchpad drivers are the ones from the Acer website and I'm at a loss as to what might be the matter Anyone else experiencing the same?

 

That scroll button is really handy when you are forced to use the touchpad instead of a wireless mouse. I don't have your model, but I can tell you what worked for me. First thing I did is to go to the Synaptics site and download their own latest version of the drivers. You can safely ignore anything you hear or read to the effect that you will lose any Acer customizations. There aren't any as far as I can tell. Install it. Make sure that in the Device Settings for the touchpad (in Mouse Properties) you enable Static or Animated Icon in taskbar. As far as I can tell, if this isn't done, the scroll button won't be enabled to work. Once I did this, it worked fine, even in Firefox. I also disabled horizontal and vertical scrolling in Device Settings to get rid of finger scrolling on the edges of the touchpad. I find that doesn't work very well anyway. Good luck.

 

I have to say I just installed the latest driver, and my middle button now does nothing too... it gave me a crash message prior to installing the latest drivers but...

 

I played some more with various mouse settings in the desperate hope to get the middle button working but all to no avail again... I just wonder now if it didn't work from the very beginning or stopped working as I uninstalled/deleted something or got in conflict with something I installed. Would be interesting to know if it actually works for somebody. My TM is from the first shipments though, manufacturing date 0601 on the bottom sticker (there were some other initial problems with it like faulty Intel_EEPROM driver...).

 

Mine is the same date as yours (first batch) and it did work until I installed the latest Synaptics driver for it... that killed it though.

To be honest I've never even attempted to use it, so quite honestly don't care enough to try to fix it... but if you find a fix I might be interested.

 

Solved at last... Just got the nerve and downloaded the generic drivers from the Synaptics website - installed without any problems on my machine by the way. The middle button became programmable at once in Mouse->Properties which is a handy thing: for example, some keyboard macros can be assigned to it. A couple of hours later it stopped working again but luckily I'd done nothing in this time except registry cleaning; so I restored the cleaned stuff and everything was ok again. Did some more experimentation and found out that some reg cleaners tend to treat as invalid and delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPPlugIns\SynTP, which busts everything. So to avoid it, just put the entry in your exclusion list.

 

Um, where do you have the Mouse -> Properties?

I tried going to mouse from control panel but didn't see a properties option, went into device settings (Synaptics Tab) and then Settings for the touchpad, but again no properties for middle button or programming or anything?

 

Yeah, right, once the Synaptics tab is opened go to Settings and on the left there'll be a menu and Buttons will be just the thing... programmable assignments is one of the available options.

 

AH HA!!!! Okay, you mean the "Scroll left button action" options, sorry I was taking you literally and looking for some sort of "middle button" options or "programmable buttons" option.

Thanks a bunch