M17x R2 touchpad issue

Hey everyone, so I finally received my AW m17x R2 today...its really great but the touchpad is horrible. I went through the forum to find a fix to this but it seems there aren't any updated drivers out there that might fix the laggy choppy movement of the touchpad.

The touchpad is really pathetic...some people told me it wasn't good before I got the system but I couldn't have imagined that it would be this bad.

It makes me wonder...is this a software issue or is it a fault with the hardware itself?

 

Best thing I've found is to use the Windows drivers for it. Don't install the touch pad drivers that come on the resources CD just let Windows install it's own, it works smoothly with them.

 

My touchpad has the same problem. I wasn't expecting it to be bad at all because all the reviews i read said that the touchpad was amazing. it works pretty good though if you turn the sensitivity to the lowest setting.

 

Honestly guys just try it with the Windows drivers, they are far better than the ones on the resource CD or Dell's site.

 

The problem is the polling rate (as well as crappy Synaptics drivers). There's already a thread regarding it and Dell is aware of the issue and investigating it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/476269-m17x-r2-slow-mouse-11.html#post6262458

 

Thanks for the response guys, I called in tech support just now and the guys said this is the first time he's receiving a complaint about the touchpad. He said its definitely a hardware issue and he will replace it. Unfortunately, I'm leaving the country for 2 weeks so I told him if he could get it done within this week but he said no that wasn't possible and he told me to call back when I return. I told him I dont wanna go through the whole testing process again with some other guy so he sent me an email and told me you can mail me directly and I'll send in the technician with the replacement.

But my question is, if this is really a driver issue then how is Dell taking such a long time to fix this? And if its a hardware issue then will they replace the touchpads of everyone who are affected by this?

 

A replacement will not solve the problem for you. *Every* M17x has this problem, R1 and R2. The issue is that this is also partly a problem with Windows Vista/7 drivers for the i8042 PS/2 controller. I don't think the O/S is allowing the PS/2 polling rate to be changed by mouse/trackpad drivers. There used to be a setting in device manager or a registry setting that could fix this. Neither exist after XP. I think this will be a combination effort between Synaptics and Microsoft if we will ever see a complete fix.

 

BTW, there's no problem with TP in Linux, so it's 100% software not hardware issue as was mentioned.

 

This is correct.

 

As posted by Elkay, please continue this in the established thread.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/476269-m17x-r2-slow-mouse-11.html#post6262458

Thanks.