Touchpad acting crazy

My borther's Alienware 17 R1 has developed a weird issue.

The touch pad will sometimes not move properly and go all over the place on the screen. This happens 40-50% of the time. It's not a software issue as I've completely reinstalled the OS and it has done it in the BIOS diagnostics screen as well.

The whole palm rest (including the touch pad) was replaced maybe 6 months ago? So I don't see how the touch pad itself could have gone bad already.

 

Have you double checked that all screws are flush (and present) and ground tabs are all making proper contact?

 

Erratic touch pad behavior may be from:

Drivers: Recently W10 pushed a very bad driver update to Synaptics touch pads that caused problems similar to your description. So, make sure that he isn't running any driver other than the one on DELL drivers page for that model.

Poor ribbon cable connection or loose screws. As @namaiki highlighted you should check the newly installed palmrest and make sure everything is connected properly and no ribbon cables were cut by installing base screws.

Laptops connected to power source with bad Grounding: poorly grounded power outlets make touch pads act erratically, so try to connect the laptop to different outlets or through UPS to cancel that one out.