M15x & M17x Touchpad cursor movement & polling rate problems

Awesome, good to see Dell doing something about it. So far my experience with Dell has been fantastic. I got a great deal and free upgraded shipping, and on top of that it's nice to see them doing something about the trackpad

 

I too am experiencing this and found it very strange that such a high end system would have such a crappy polling rate.

 

I only wish I'd mentioned this sooner. It was the very first thing I noticed about the laptop the moment I turned it on. I was like.. "Ugh! This isn't gonna work!" Luckily the Windows drivers were marginally better, but I hate not being able to tweak my scroll regions and touch sensitivity now.

 

Thanks for looking into this Chris. Also thanks to Bill for passing it on.

We all noticed it but I guess since most of us have external mice we didnt chose this hill to die on as there there were others that were more important. DPC, Flickering ect....

Now we can focus on this and get this resolved.

 

Absolutely agree on the other more pressing issues. I never use an external mouse, though, so in my case this is pretty important now that the other problems have mostly been resolved. Whenever I'm gaming, I'm doing it from my couch, not a desk.

 

I hear ya.. it is important from the view we paid for a working one and in the condition it currently is, I dont consider it working lol.. more of an annoyance..


More power to ya.. I can use the touchpad for basic stuff and browsing but never for gaming.. That would drive me crazy.. To much of a mouse person i suppose..

I just hope this gets done quickly.

 

Same here. Although I have an external mouse and have been using it with my M17x since the touchpad is so bad. I never used an external mouse on my M1730 as I was always using it at the couch.

This may not have been as pressing of an issue as the others, but I still think it's quite critical and nearly a deal-breaker for me if it can't get fixed.

 

This is a USB mouse in Linux (Just to make sure the mouse rate checker is working correctly in Linux)


Check. Mouse rate checker works excellent in linux.

Here's the m17x R2 touchpad in Linux. I'm not sure what's causing the sporadic quick (200+hz) updates, but this touchpad DEFINITELY supports normal PS/2 speeds. The touchpad acts flawlessly in linux, smooth as silk.

P.S. if anyone wants to give it a shot in Linux (via wine), you need MFC42.dll in the executable directory for it to launch.

 

Yeah, it's a driver issue, not a hardware issue. We just need better drivers.

 

Thanks CF, I was actually going to suggest someone try Linux but I've never used Wine so I wasn't sure if the rate checker would work or be accurate.

So there you have it. The hardware definitely supports proper functionality. Perhaps Chris/Bill should also forward that information off to Synaptics.

 

I know that I stated it in the original post, I just wanted to support it with some irrefutable evidence.

 

If only we had some community member who was experienced in driver coding, but that would take some serious hexadecimal skills I'd imagine

 

I actually did crack open the Synaptics driver. Some interesting registry settings it reads, but nothing blatant as to a hidden setting we could use, and nothing obvious data-wise relating to the polling rate. I'm not very experienced with disassembly/debugging machine code, unfortunately (I only write VB and rudimentary C).

 

I would think this would be a fast and easy setting adjustment that Dell could have done. I dont see why it should take long to adjust it..

 

The change is likely in the driver itself, and that will take some time, at least for someone to make the update and recompile the driver, provide it to Dell and have it go through the Dell driver certification process. I wouldn't expect it to be sitting in our hands Monday morning, but I've been wrong before. An update on the situation from Dell sometime next week would be nice, though.

 

Anyone have any updates? I've heard nothing so far.

 

Nothing thus far. I'll ask for an update mid next week if we haven't heard anything, but as I already stated, a driver update (or possibly BIOS, as some systems have needed) can take some time to figure out, implement, and test.

 

Agreed, I don't expect a fix immediately, but I would like to hear some kind of confirmation from engineering on the issue.

 

*bump*

Dell reps? any word?

 

Any tech support reps we can email? I know we can't post their info here, but if anyone wants to PM I'd be happy to send emails out to other reps. Maybe if more than one person is sending them emails linking back to this forum it will help get their attention.

 

I'll try to get an update for you all.

 

No news in todays meeting.

 

Sweet. I'm glad there is some progress on this issue. I got about 500hz polling rate average. (but I'm using a Razer Imperator gaming mouse)

 

Thanks Chris, I just hope this doesnt fall to the wayside. We all would like to see this corrected.

 

just to update, the new bios did not fixed that problem (not that i hoped it would )

 

I am sure they will have ti release a new driver for it as well.

 

yeah, you're right...

 

Not necessarily, but possibly. There was another laptop, I believe it was an HP, that had the same problem and a BIOS update fixed it. I think the BIOS needs to set the appropriate polling rate of the i8042 controller.

 

Well while i agree to you up to a certain extent then why does it work right under linux and if you use the windows driver it responds better.. Those two things have nothing to do with the bios.. So while i can say yes that can be somewhat a solution, most of it will be driver based and how the operating system works with the hardware.

 

I'll agree with respect to the alternate O/S not having the problem. The problem with this is Windows Vista/7 and how it treats PS/2 devices. I'm not sure MS lets you override the PS/2 rate at the driver level anymore. I've tried many a hack that used to work and none of them change the rate even with the built-in drivers. Forcing the polling rate at the BIOS/hardware level may be the easier route. We're not the engineers though, so that decision is up to them.

 

I just received my M17x-R2 yesterday... I couldn't believe how horrible the polling rate was. This thread was one of the only ones I could find about the issue. I'm going call support and point them to this thread as well. The more people that call and complain, the more likely we'll get it resolved quicker.

 

I called Alienware tech support on 5/14 to report the issue, and was told there were "no know issues." They took my information and "passed it on to the engineers." I don't have much faith...

 

Yea well Chris and Bill have been informed about this issue.. I hope they fix it. I actually have my laptop at work today testing a new WIFI card and the touchpad is horrible....

 

every time i see this thread updated i click in hope of finding a patch here and each time i get disappointed

 

Yea same here. When I seen the post earlier I was hoping.. Sorry to get ya hopes up lol.

 

I might as well get your hopes up one more time.. but yeah I feel the same.

 

well seems like the problem is fundamentally wrong with the hardware. its not just teh m17x, but also with the m15x, and i dont think anyone was able to completely fix the problem with some driver tweaking

 

Not *completely* due to the fact that Linux does not have the problem. I do think that Windows Vista/7 will be a roadblock, though, because I think the problem is rooted with their drivers for the i8042 and the inability to override their polling rate. We'll see, though.

 

It's not hardware based, because installing other drivers (windows default for example) fixes the issue. The problem is, installing the default windows drivers causes you to no longer be able to tweak the sensitivity in the Alienware control center. Also, when I tried to install the drivers, it would work and then immediately on reboot somehow windows would reinstall the synaptics drivers and restart again (???). Not really sure why, but it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.

 

It doesn't completely fix the issue. You're still stuck at around 40hz polling rate with the default Windows drivers. That's horrible for FPS games. I would like to see 200hz at least, which is what Windows XP supported out of the box.

 

Can someone that has linux boot it, run the polling software and then post screenshot so we can see the difference?

 

Already been done on this thread.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/476269-m17x-r2-slow-mouse-6.html#post6203746

 

DOH!!! THats right.. I just didnt scroll back 10 pages looking

<===newb

 

Haha it's all good. I'm part of so many M17x problem threads that I forget who posted what on which thread. Hopefully they resolve this stuff so I don't have to keep track of it all.

 

Yea i guess i could say i keep posting here to keep it alive.

 

I'm getting more and more frustrated. The fact that we're all getting the same "passed to engineering" answer doesn't make me happy. I've called to check the status of my "escalated" issue and they tell me they'll look into it and give me a call or an email back and of course I never hear another word.

I don't expect immediate resolution, of course, but it would be nice to hear some feedback from engineering and that they have at least replicated the issue.

Unfortunately, as it's 100% consistent across M17x's, I can't imagine they would never have noticed it. I would expect it's more likely that the polling rate is up to Dell's standards for quality.

 

^ This. Unfortunately.

 

I'm using a Razer Mamba with my new m17x. I haven't noticed a slow mouse issue, but I have noticed the really quiet hard drive (or some other quiet intermittent clicking) noise becomes constant when I move the mouse. First time I've noticed that with a computer, and I only noticed it when the apartment was perfectly quiet.

 

We need to have a mod change the thread title. It's the trackpad we're talking about, not an external mouse.

 

Good call.

Seconded.