M15x & M17x Touchpad cursor movement & polling rate problems

Chris's post with requested info and contact address are referenced in the poll question. I have also added a note to post #1 to see his post for additional info.

 

Please people email if you experience this issue. Im not sure if this being a poll/sticky is helping as its not floating around the new posts

I'm happen with the attention this is getting. I hope we can also bring some of this attention to the throttling thread on the M15x as that seems more crippling? Any chance Chris? Thanks in advance

 

Its up to 15x/17x owners who feel this is an issue to respond and shoot Chris an email. As to posting if you sent email or whatever... if you want to post, fine. Be sure to hit the vote as well. In any event, discuss what you want as long as its related to the thread topic.

Kamin and I will handle any OT posts

Thanks everyone. Any questions re: mod of this thread, shoot one of us a PM.

 

Just to clear the naming confusion. M17x is the first release. M17x R1 is the second release. Sorry if I confused all by using M17x R2.

 

Bumping isn't needed any longer, seeing as this is now a sticky.

 

I agree. I'm at a loss. If it's not considered an issue, we would have gotten that response up front. If it is considered an issue, why ignore it until now? I simply can't believe this was not something that was encountered in initial testing.

That is unless this is one of those "Emperor's New Clothes" situations where everyone knew it but nobody said anything for fear of getting in trouble.

Whatever the case, the situation is frustrating at best.

 

Emailed today

 

Just because I see a lot of this going around, IF there is a fix for this eventually I don't want everybody being upset that they are not going to see 500hz because it's flat out not going to happen. You'll see the 500+hz with your Mamba mouse but that's a special high end gaming mouse, your typical USB mouse is going to run at a flat 125hz. Your typical touchpad is going to be around 80hz. These are still perfectly acceptable numbers (higher than your refresh rate) and would be pretty standard to see a in machine like this.

I'm not asking to see 500hz out of this touchpad, I would like to see 60hz+.

 

I really want them to enable pinch zooming, I know the surface isn't really made for it but if the feature is there, gimped in some way I'd still use it. I emailed Chris on Friday.

 

Agreed. I've seen nothing less than the low to mid 80's on every touchpad I've tested. Even 80hz feels smooth as butter compared to this touchpad. If they could at least bring this pad on par with typical touchpad performance, I would be quite happy.

 

Seeing what the M1730 had would be acceptable. ~100hz is a substantial improvement.

 

Same here 80-100 would be a dream.. I would be totally ok with that.

 

Thank teh lord finally people are looking at this issue. I was complaining about this for months .. even here people were telling me to just deal with it, that it wasn't that bad.

Again Thank you all & Thank you Chris.

 

I reformatted my comp(M17x R1) and used my HD from my p-7805u to get all my files from. Booted to the OS on that drive(W7 Ult.), and it was much better. Refresh was about 50-55. Still a little buggy, but way better. So what gives? The drivers I had on it were the new multitouch drivers released about a month or so ago. Hmmmmmmm?

 

I take it if the keyboard wasnt ps2 and was USB we wouldnt even be complaining about this?

 

Most likely not but the drivers seem to be the main problem since this works fine in linux

 

Every Synaptics touchpad I've used is PS/2 and I've never seen this kind of poor performance, so it's not just a matter of the interface.

 

PS/2 devices have no problem going >200hz. The interface is most definitely not the issue here.

 

As you and others said before .. its clear its driver/software related as it is not present when using linux... Such a relief.

 

Yep so it can be addressed with a proper driver. Drivers are supposed to make the touchpad/mouse better than the default windows one not worse like we experience with M17x/M15x...

 

I wish we could grab an open source driver...

 

My wife just used my M17x for an hour and mentioned about 10 times, with no prompting, how horrible the touchpad was. This needs fixing.

 

Logitech G9 gives a 500Hz refresh rate. On M1730, either thru USB hub or direct USB.

I think there's software that can alter it. Must d/l that have a look into it.

 

The trackpad is PS/2, though. Changing USB settings won't get you anywhere.

 

rofl, how did they not find this bug?

I just got my alienware m15x today, and the weirdness of the touchpad and the mouse cursor movement was one of the first things I noticed...

I mean, the mouse cursor *clearly* jitters across the screen.

Using that mouse rate checker, i get about 20Hz with the touch pad, and about 120Hz with a mouse

Using fedora 13 / linux (which installed great btw), the touchpad works fine

 

lol I did that too just to make sure I wasnt being silly making this such a big issue.. I asked like 6 random people just to try, all right away complained..

Why are these things happening on a big bad "ALIENWARE" thats lame.

 

No idea.. this seems to be a M.O. though... this ... the throttling.. very easy to prove that they are defects still coming out of the factory... but yet nothing.. over and over...

Plz help!

 

Make sure to send chris your info so it adds to the cause...

 

Agreed - it is being worked on so lets give the Hive a chance to resolve...

 

This has been a problem from unit 1 on every unit shipped they should all hide they heads in shame and all the people who wrote articles with glowing reports never said a word. This has been going on for well over a year. A total disgrace. And now they are working on it. So after building hundreds if not thousands of laptops with the worst touch-pad performance ever we should be happy. Most of the time I go back to my 5 year old Inspiron 9200 with a perfect touch pad just to look at a web page. Their lucky they don't get massive returns for refunds.

 

I agree 100%. Everyone keeps saying "give them a chance, now that they know about it," but I'm sorry, I don't believe they haven't known about it, and they've certainly had time to address it.

They haven't even come back with anything stating that, yes, this is a problem, it's something we can and will fix, and here's a ballpark ETA on an attempted fix. Even if you go by this thread alone, they've had nearly two full months to look at the issue, without so much as acknowledging anything beyond the fact that it's been submitted to engineering and they want emails from those of us experiencing the issue. Everyone with an M17x or M15x experiences the issue.

The only reason we haven't been screaming for a year about this issue is these laptops have had so many other serious issues between DPC latency, throttling, etc, that were focused on those issues almost wholly for the past year.

 

The most important reason for neglecting, IMHO, is the fact that most of us use external gamin mice from the day one. Thus the issue went unnoticed for quite a long time.

 

I sent my email. I hope Dell gets this fixed soon, I use the touchpad a lot.

 

There are easy ways to increase the PS/2 polling rate in windows 98, 2K and XP, but i CAN'T find anything for Vista/7!

 

Hi lads,

I'm another who's experiencing these difficulties. I bought an M17x ~2 weeks ago and at first I thought the jitteryness was down to the texture of the pad and thought maybe it just takes a bit of getting used to or bedding in or something... After bolloxing with it for a while, I started to think otherwise and was very glad to find this thread!

I've only the use of one hand so I need to use the touchpad for gaming (mostly FPS) and to be honest it's almost unplayable with the touchpad. I changed sensitivity settings etc but it didn't really help. Dropping the resolution in-game to 800 x 600 actually made a big difference but that kinda defeats the purpose of buying a machine like M17...

I just saw this thread now so I'll have a look at the polling when I get home this evening and send results to Chris

And like many others, I appreciate the effort everyone is making!

 

No news from Chris ?

 

I guess this is why DELL gave you a free mouse pad. Nothing comes for free of charge

 

Its actually pretty embarrassing when I show my comp off to some friends, who ask about the crappy touchpad and were like "How much was this laptop?".

 

How come I don't see you under the list as those who've emailed Chris!?

 

yea.. the only thing i disliked was the touch pad.. but windows 7 took care of it pretty well

 

Actually got a laugh out of this haha.

 

please make sure to email chris and update the poll at the top.

 

This, a zillion times this!

 

Would like to have an update from Chris.

 

Chris has already told me, and stated here, that he's not going to update when he has nothing to report.

 

Does Chris use a M17X R2? Everyday? With the Touch pad? He could form his own report

 

I love to use a track pad, because since I go to college and I do bring the computer every day. Man it just does not look so cool and professional with ton of wires and plus an external mouse with your $2000 computer.

 

I agree.. you would expect even the touchpad to be great on such a specialty item. However, have faith, now that we have discovered that it works good in linux it can be fixed.


Just curious, has anyone installed Windows XP on their M15x?

 

Nope, but on WinXp you can adjust the polling rate manually by using the right software and exactly THIS software doesn't work on Win7/vista.
Or via this registry tweak, that doesn't work on win7 aswell

 

Your right who needs a report they shipped a laptop with a touchpad that is worthless for over a year. Someone needs to just try their own product and then hide they head in shame for shipping a piece of crap for a touchpad and making believe they know nothing about it. A 5 year old could tell it is no good in 10 seconds. Report what a joke