Help! UX31E Sentelic Touchpad Windows 8 Driver? Searched everywhere! Any advice?

Greetings!

I come here in desperation, with one last hope before this UX31E gets boxed back up and goes back to Asus to be replaced with something from another manufacturer. I should note that I'm here asking on the notebookreview forum because Asus' own support is so bad that I simply got sick of calling and trying to find a lucky-smart agent of the bunch. Anyway, I digress.

I bought my fiance this laptop, refurbished, for Christmas because for the price, no Ultrabook can touch it. Or so I thought. I immediately installed a fresh copy of Windows 8 Professional and all was well. I got most of the drivers installed and since everything "worked," I put it under the tree and went about my business. I didn't use it in any length of time and I was using a mouse to do all the drivers since I was at home and find it preferable to a touchpad typically. She got it on Christmas, loved the look and feel of it, and absolutely hates the touchpad. The mouse flies all over the screen when your palm comes into the corner and she's finding it unusable. We have two options - use it with a mouse forever (which she won't do) or try to fix these drivers. It has the Sentelic touchpad, unfortunately. Oddly enough, the Elantech drivers installed, but would not support any of the functions. Looking at the device ID in device manager, it's definitely a Sentelic touchpad (STLC400 I believe?). Anyway, I keep reading that these are inferior to the Elantech pads, which are pretty lousy in and of themselves! So, since the current Asus Smart Gestures driver for Windows 8 WILL NOT install no matter what, I went hunting for the actual Sentelic driver. I've searched high and low and cannot find one that will work on Windows 8. Both support reps I talked to had me uninstall and reinstall the ATK drivers, then attempt the Smart Gestures touchpad driver, and it failed each time. Finally, the rep told me "you have a compatibility issue that we cannot help with."

Sorry for the long-winded post. Can anyone help me? I really want to love this laptop and even more so, I want my fiance to love it.

Thank you for anything anyone can provide,

-Collin-

 

Well first off, I am TRULY sorry to hear that what would otherwise have been an epic Christmas gift, so far has turned out to be a lemon.

Question: Does the default Windows driver for the touchpad work? If you were to uninstall the Elantech driver and allow Windows to auto-detect the device thereafter - or run Windows Update after uninstalling, then perhaps that would solve the jumpy issue. You can then try updating the driver software from the Device Manager and click on "Browse My Computer" to have the driver standalone installed, bypassing the setup utility.

I hope you can get it working! They really are good - if not the best - alternative to a Mac ultrabook.

 

Thank you for the reply!

Well, the touchpad worked with the generic Windows 8 drivers. Unfortunately, the two finger scrolling didn't work at all, and neither did the pinch zooming. The touchpad itself wasn't very reliable either and maybe I'm asking too much of an Ultrabook, but it was unusable compared to my Lenovo W520. Yes, I know that's a seven pound beast, but it's my only reference for comparison. When she used it, her palm touching the touchpad is what really set things off, causing the mouse to jump all over. This was with the Windows 8 generic drivers.

I should point out that I've made some progress (it's all I've been doing today). I managed to successfully install the Windows 7 64 bit Sentelic driver by pointing to it in device manager. It then actually showed up as a Sentelic touchpad, which led me to believe I was making progress. I then poked through the Sentelic driver folder provided by Asus and went into the x64 folder. I found the software application file and double clicked it. Nothing happened, or so I thought! I checked in the system tray and there it was - the software working correctly with gestures! Problem is, that file wasn't installed and doesn't startup on boot. So, I copied the file to the hard drive and told Windows to start it up on each startup. It takes about 10 seconds to load once you're into windows, but then, the touchpad works as it should for the most part! Great success!

I still think it's a very lousy touchpad, but at least the functionality of it works. I'm going to bring the laptop home and have my fiance try it again tonight and I think she'll see a marked improvement. I wish the palm rejection (or Asus Smart Detect, I think they call it) worked better, but maybe I'm just sloppy with my hands. We'll leave it at that

Thanks!

-Collin-

 

What a weird fix. I've had a similar experience with a flatbed scanner driver, so I guess it's not entirely uncommon.

To be fair, even touchpads who's drivers work fine, still give people a lot of problems; not that they're faulty, they're just a bit unwieldy.

Hopefully she likes it!