Touchpad woes

Hey guys, just picked up an m15x from a pawn shop with the ATI 5850, 8gb RAM, 920xm and 480gb sandisk ssd and 500gb hdd in optical caddy. Also came with a Razer Mamba mouse. One improvement I wonder about is the touchpad. I hate the feel of it, and it's quite non-responsive. Can it be swapped for one from a newer alienware like the m14x or...is there any way to use synaptics scrybe with the right drivers to get multitouch on the existing pad? My gf has an asus g74 and I really like the spin scroll feature, would like to have it on my machine as well.

 

Do you mean the chiral scroll, it worked for me when I downloaded the drivers from the synaptics website.

 

Yup, so that works with the generic synaptics driver? What about multitouch like pinch zoom? I can't test it right now myself because my machine is stripped down to parts. I am removing the cpu, gpu, and heat sinks and lapping them and doing some experimentation with applying indigo xtreme and putting in some new fujipoly extreme pads on the VRAM while I'm in there. Still waiting on deliveries ATM.

 

Heh, I've been there tried to get my two finger scroll to work with old drivers but they used to be finicky. You could try them but I don't remember other multitouch features working with those.

 

Try the latest drivers available from the manufacturer and let us know how it goes

 

Make sure you're running the the latest BIOS, my touchpad was really clunky and laggy until I updated it to the latest BIOS. Used to be a common complaint on these forums.

 

I'm using the mfg drivers, ill check version at home. Found them in a link thread and enabled multi touch scrolling in the registry.

Works great for two finger

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk 2

 

Yep I'm running A09. First thing I did when I got it was fresh Win7 install and update all drivers that I could find. Some things I used from Dell support, wasn't sure what I could update from the manufacturer's drivers without borking the system, still looking into some of that.

Jarv, it's not so much laggy as just sort of doesn't always pick up light touches (even with sens. dialed up) and has a hard time registering touches at the edge of the pad. Also it seems like it has a very high friction surface compared to my girlfriend's g74, although I think I have taken care of that. Last night I modded my touchpad surface by polishing it. Started with superfine sandpaper and a block, then hit it with some chromium oxide and a buffing wheel. Now it's nice and smooth and slick.

Thanks for the info Daverish, that should be helpful.

 

As you can see the version is v15.0.15.01Apr10 and I downloaded them from the synaptic website. I personally despite chiral but I like multi-touch/tap. I'll edit this if/when I can find the original location that mentioned the registry key to enable the option for two finger scrolling AND two/three finger tapping shortcuts






edits:

Looks like the two finger scrolling bit is native to the synaptic driver. I know there was something you can enable in the registry, still looking. And im not on the latest version, screw this im not afraid of borking anything softwarewise. Gonna try their newest versions and see whats around EVEN if I use a external mouse like 95% of the time

Newest version from their website won't work for any multitouch including two finger scrolling which I had before. Going to mess around with this throughout the weekend/next week between work projects.

Before update: I used two finger scrolling on X/Y axis. I also had tried out triple three finger tap opening apps and it did work but this new version fubarred. Always fun to investigate

 

Yeah I got my system back together this morning (Actually installed Indigo Xtreme on my CPU and GPU, it's working awesome!) and tried out the latest Synaptic driver. AWFUL. Completely made the touchpad disgustingly laggy and unresponsive. I'll try the older version and use some Google-fu on the registry key info.