Alienware 17 Touchpad not working?

I have a 2014 Alienware 17, and the touchpad is completely unresponsive. Nothing happens when I try and activate the touchpad by using the Fn + F11 key combination, and I cannot access the AlienTouch component of the Command Center (when I do I get an error window and the program crashes). I have had this problem for over a month now and have just been making do with an external mouse which is recognized fine by windows. I am on Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit.
Some additional information:

• I have tried to uninstall and reinstall of the Synaptics Driver v17.0 (is successfully installed but does not change anything)
• I also tried to uninstall and reinstall of the Alien Command Center v3.6 (does not change anything)
• The touchpad does not show up in the windows device manager at all
• I considered doing a system restore but i don't have any restore points before I noticed the touchpad wasn't working
• I tried a generic Synaptics Driver from their website but I didn't have any luck with it
• I tried an older Synaptics Driver from dell v16 but it didn't change anything
• Whenever I enter the Control Panel and try to access the Mouse section I get an error stating it cannot connect to the Synaptics Pointing Device Driver

Right now it looks like my only other option is to do a clean install of Windows again which is something I want to avoid. So does anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks for your help.

Here is an image of the error message that I get whenever I try and access the AlienTouch settings.


The error from the mouse section of the Control Panel looks like this.

 

The exact thing happend to me.
I used the laptop inly with wireless keyboard and mouse... And ... You have drivers conflict, uninstall all drivers for keyboard and mouse and ten install synaptics from dell site.

 

I tried completely uninstalling everything and using the drivers from the dell site, but I haven't had any success.

 

Have you done a windows reinstall and then done this? This would be the last thing to do and if it didn't work, well it may be a hardware fault..

 

Just FYI, in case it helps, because I just had this issue after opening my computer up to put new RAM and an mSATA SSD in the slots on top of the Motherboard. I forgot to plug the keyboard/mouse cable back in the first time I turned it on, and when I fixed that problem, the keyboard worked, and the mouse didn't. All the symptoms were exactly the same, though I didn't try reinstalling drivers (I told it "no", I didn't want to uninstall the synaptics drivers, which theoretically should have worked. Perhaps it didn't...).

Upgrading from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 appears to have fixed my problem. Whether this is because I DID need to reinstall the drivers, or if the system needed a reset of some kind, I don't know, but it worked. Prior to the upgrade, even the LED backlighting of the mouse pad wouldn't work.

I also know that you don't have to do clean installs off of an OS disc. You can do OS "Repair" using those discs, which goes in and reinstalls any missing drivers, or resets drivers to the version contained on the disc. If you haven't, yet, that may be another solution instead of a clean install on a reformatted hard drive.

My computer is a 2014 version Alienware 17 R1. I only got it a week ago, yesterday, new in an unopened box from eBay.

And again, I'm leaving this reply simply because I got the exact same symptoms and error messages, and my computer also refused to recognize the hardware.

I hope this helps...