Solutions to keyboard lag in Asus M50 series

OK guys I bought a f8va-c1 roughly about week and half ago. Immediately started experiencing the missed key strokes/lag however you want to call it. I really didn't try any of the fixes besides updating the bios, which of course did not work. I will tell you this though, clodus is a genius. Just had an urge to try his fix because it sounded easy. I have been running the laptop with this fix for 30 mins, I typed a half of page on open office just to test it and had 0 keystroke misses/lag. On top of that, I personally believe whatever driver vista replaces the synaptic driver with is way better. Mainly because when you use the side scroller it's very responsive, and on the synaptic it seemed like you had to touch it just in a certain spot. So i'll be the first to thank you clodus on a job well done, your fix worked 100%!!!!!!!!(Messaged type fully without a single lag/miss, before it was roughly 10-20% misses/lag.)

EDIT:

Alright the fix is 100% the problem, like I said 0 issues, except I can't disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in. Wondering if anyone knows how to do this without synaptic?

 

Not sure it's possible... except perhaps via Device Manager (disable the hardware itself).

 

Hello CrimsonClown, thank you for the compliment.
I myself have not found a way to disable the touchpad yet. With the windows driver, it seems that it recognizes the touchpad as a mouse plugged into the ps/2 port. Thus pressing fn+touchpad on/off will not work.

I have a theory that re-installing the asus KB filter may solve the problem (5% chance only). But I don't have my M50 to test it right now.

One question though, how did you manage to make your 'side scroller' work? I assume this is the virtual scrolling. I want to know how you enabled this. To my experience, it will not work with the vista driver.

 

clodus, honestly after I ran ccleaner, went into bios and enabled the touchpad again, it all worked on it's own. Still have had 0 problems with lag/missed keystrokes. At first I was disappointed in my laptop, and felt like I got a junk laptop. NOw though with the fix I am 100% happy with my laptop, only wish I could turn the touch pad off while mouse is plugged in. I would much rather learn to type on my keyboard without touching the touchpad, than worry about having to correct 1 or 2 words out of every 10 I type. BTW I don't have m50 series, I have the identical laptop except it's f8va-c1 (14.1 inch screen, and ati 3650 gpu).

 

I strongly believe that the following functionality:

touchpad toggle hotkey,
automatic toggling of the touchpad when the external mouse is plugged in

depend on the Synaptics driver. So I do not believe you will get it to work with the default Windows driver.

 

I have contacted Asus support and they tell me they are working on a bios update for this problem...the only thing you can do for now is disable the touchpad in the bios and use a mouse. That fixes it 100%.

 

There are other things you can do besides that that still retain touchpad functionality, see above for some suggestions.

 

So I take it they didn't give you any type of eta on the bios release did they stan?

 

Probably not. They've been 'working on' this for nearly a couple months now.

 

its weird, it appears after i first installed it, the skips were virtually gone, but now that i've restarted and messing around the next day, its like there is no difference.

 

AFter you first installed what? I'm assuming the newest bios, which still doesn't correct the missed keystrokes, still waiting on the fix to come out. However if it's something else be more specific. BTW clodus's fix does work if you want to try that, I've used my keyboard for the last 3 or 4 days with the fix, and still haven't had a missed keystroke. I take a typing test each day (typeracer) and have 0 keys missed 90+ wpms. So trust me when I say it WORKS

 

90+ wpm! Whoah!
The most I can do is around 70+ wpm without considering fatigue.

And at 70wpm, the keylag/skip really annoys me! Good thing the default windows drivers works with the touchpad.

Still trying to find a synaptics fix for the palm check feature. The credit card covering technique is at times a hassle when it comes to overall usability. Also, need it for the scrolling.

 

After a lot of avoidance, I finally disabled the touchpad in the bios and the keyboard lag stopped. I uninstalled the synaptic driver, and reenabled the touchpad and let the Windows driver do its install..

No keyboard lag yet, but a much less capable touchpad in return. (The side scrolling does not work).

I can live with that trade off for the moment.

Thanks Clodus for the work around.

 

Here's something interesting.

I downloaded the driver for the LuxPad 6.2 from the synaptic site (driver v.10.1.8.0). I installed it, and now the touchpad works and there is no keyboard lag that I can see so far.

I don't seem to have access anymore to the multimedia mode, but I never used it anyway.

If the lag comes back I will let you know.

 

Supposedly, BIOS 209 has fixed this problem for some. Can anyone support this?

 

Hello Stephen, thanks for the suggestion.
Have already tried the 10.1.8.0 driver. It is not a 100% fix, as you keep on using it, the lag will eventually come back. Unless you have done certain tweaks and settings, please do let us know.

Hi Deviant, as for Bios 209. Bios 209 was formerly available for download in the asus website. But for some reason, they have removed it and stuck with bios 207.
From my testing, Bios 209 does not fix the keyboard lag. Also, bios 209 boots slower than bios 207, other bugs I don't know yet nor want to try finding it out. In the end I went back to bios 207, and to my opinion the slow boot up alone is a good reason for asus to remove it from their support website.

Have not found a synaptics driver fix yet. For the bold ones, go to laptopvideo2go forums. You will find a lot of syanaptics drivers in there official and not official going as much to v11. Have also tried those and it does not work.

 

I don't know why you guys side scrolling doesn't work for ya'll, I have the default windows mouse driver, and my touchpad allows me to side scroll...I have the f8va-c1, don't think it should matter though. As for installing the newest driver for synaptics, keep me posted on whether or not that is working for you. Although I have had 0 lag/missed keystrokes, I still hate the fact that I can't disable my touchpad when I want, or when I plug a mouse in.

 

Oh well. You were right. I've started to experience the lag again, nowhere near as bad as before though (yet).

I guess someone at Synaptic has some homework to do.

 

You also get missed keystrokes on the F8V?

 

Yes you do. I've had my laptop for almost a month now, and as soon as I got it I started noticing the missed keystrokes. Did a little research, I found clodus's fix. I did clodus's fix and I have had 0 missed keystrokes for some time now. Although I did download the latest synaptics driver, in hopes that it would fix the problem. As soon as I installed and restarted I immediately noticed the missed keystrokes again, so I just removed the driver and went back with default. Works good for me, except, when I type it doesn't disable the touchpad, as well when a mouse is plugged in it doesn't disable touchpad. So until asus or synaptics releases a fix, I am stuck with using window's default driver.

 

Hey guys, I have an M51Ta and I also have keyboard lag.

Asus came out with a update for the hotkey drivers (tech support told me to try these)

I cant exactly tell if they are working for me or not. It feels ok but sometimes it doesnt (which could be me hitting the touchpad or something)

Anyway when you get to the downloads section with the 3 dropdown boxes, select these three things, respectively:

Notebook
Drivers (for the model section you can select drivers)
ATK Hotkey (for the last section)

See if it helps, as im typing this I think I still have a trace of it. I might try the XP ATI VGA drivers and go with XP to see how that works out.

 

Have you tried to remove the touchpad driver and run with the default driver? That fixes the problem for most users, and I'm curious whether it fixes it on an AMD notebook, as well.

 

Didnt Asus release 209 BIOS which worked for people in terms of KB lag?

 

Looks like that updated version of the hotkey drivers didnt work so well so I removed ATK hotkey once again and its better but still quite noticeable, even as I am typing this I have had to slow down.

How frustrating X_X

 

Well, I read in some posts that it worked for them, no idea @_@

 

I just reformatted with Windows XP Professional 32 bit (Im gonna have to take the bullet and just use the VGA drivers supplied for XP on the asus site for the MOBILITY radeon 3650)

One of the first things I did (before installing drivers) was test for keyboard lag. I can say with 95% confidence that I have not run into any. God willing I will keep you updated after I install synaptics drivers and ATK Hotkey drivers (this is on an M51Ta)

 

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried the drivers that were updated on the 27th thats on the ASUS servers? Its located under touchpad and it is Version V10.1.6.0. I don't have this laptop yet, so I cannot try it myself. Looking forward to hearing some good news!

http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

 

Well, it's been almost a month since I last checked, and nothing new from Asus. How disappointing.

 

Yup, this sucks... I got a G50 and got same issues..

Wondering if anyone has messed with any of these drivers?

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15103&st=0

I dont have time tonight to play but maybe one of those newer ones will fix it?

 

I installed it last week (v. 11.2.15) and have had minimal keyboard lag (there is still some though but livable).

Of course, I don't have the custom media touchpad features for laptop, but then again I didn't use them anyway.

-Stephen

 

I dont find it helping anymore than the other drivers... I think part of it is in our heads because we want it to be better, but really it seems to be okay some times, other times only annoy a little, and than some times every other word.

I dont think any of these drivers have an effect on the issue.

I would just use the MS ones if they had a way to adjust how senstive the thing was...

Please open an Asus ticket, I have one but they cliam this has all been fixed and dont think its an issue, so we need people to keep contacting them even though they are clueless. Maybe it will help make them look into it better.

I found online that other manufactures had similar issues and go resolved by bios updates but just find it odd that some laptops do it and some dont. That would make me think hardware issue... The question than is it the touchpads, motherborads or something else... It bothers me me that the ones can work and some cant yet it can be fixed possibly by bios? Whats diffrent! lol

Anyway I hope this is fixed soon. I had a G50v that worked fine, returned for a VT and this thing does it yet its a newer notebook. Than my father got a VT and his does not do it, yet they are the same install, I cloned the drivers...

It sucks... He wont let me play with is neither or I would start swapping parts around to find which is really is. haha

 

I've gotten a few responses from Asus. The latest was around 2 weeks ago where they said they are still working on resolving the problem.

 

To Clodus: THANK YOU so much! You saved my laptop!

Disabling the touchpad in BIOS, Uninstalling the Synaptic drivers, and then re-enabling the touchpad in BIOS (to allow Vista to install the generic driver) worked like a charm for me - zero keyboard lag. Unfortunately, it seems that on the M50 series, this does indeed result in loss of the scrolling feature .

I've done a hell of a lot of research and it seems there are some Acer users experiencing the same problem with the same Synaptic drivers - but at the same time, there are plenty of users out there with different laptops (but the same drivers) experiencing no problems.

It seems me that its a problem with the palm-detecting technology or some kind of miscommunication between the touchpad drivers and the keyboard. The problem may be specific to certain laptops because of the way each laptop's hardware detects pressure. The synaptics driver works better for some laptops than others simply because the hardware on each of them is tuned differently.

Here's what led me to this conclusion:

A review for an MSI Wind laptop discusses a recent update to touchpad drivers that resulted in " Inconsistent functionality and led to keyboard lag." The feature that the new drivers introduced was : "Disable touchpad during typing."

So until Asus and Synaptic start talking, nothing's gonna happen - and I highly doubt Asus is going to redesign their laptop over a handful of complaints like ours.

Does it also bother anyone that all documentation from Asus and pretty much every page of their website has some MAJOR grammatical issues? I know the company is Taiwan based but come on, who the hell's running the American division?

And another thing: all the people who rave about the laptop being practically flawless: they must be some slow typers if this problem eluded them! Geezus. Shoulda done more careful research

 

This is from a newsletter that ASUS sends every month or so. this is for the G50V series so I don't know if it will work for others, and whether this actually solves the problem.



Q When using the keyboard to type documents, it will occasionally lag and skip. How can I solve it?

A Please update direct console 2 V2.0.5 and ATK hotkey V1.0.0042 to solve the problem.

Direct Message and Direct Flash Utility V2.0.5:
http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/Apps/DirectConsole/DirectConsole2_VT_080829.zip

ATK_Hotkey Utility V1.0.0042:
http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/nb/Apps/ATK_Hotkey__080912.zip

 

Yea, that junk above does not help nor do anything diffrent.

Asus is just doing blind updates in hopes something will resolve it.

If you see my other posts I have done 4+ compleat format's and I was also the first person to find that new version of DC the day it was posted on their FTP before they even released it and even with that and clean formats their latest drivesers dont do anything to fix it.

I am currently trying to get an exchange with Asus for a new laptop... My other 2 worked fine, just this one is crazy.

 

Response from ASUS Tech Support:

We have released a new driver and a new bios for your model if you have updated to both these and they have not resolved your issue. Please provide which version bios you are running as well as which synaptics driver is being used. We have never been able to replicate this issue internally. But we will send this information to our overseas development team to see if they can provide a solution to the issue whether it be a bios based update or a driver update in relation to the synaptics driver. Thank You for contacting asus notebook technical support and for using asus for your computing needs. Additionally if you have any other questions please feel free to call in at 1-888-678-3688 option 3 then option 2.

With Regards,

Juan Jose Guerrero III

 

Thats the same dude who has been talking to me for a bit... He already told me he waiting on overseas. He than told me to just send in my notebook for an DOAR (exchange) which I did but now they say if they dont think its a hardware problem they wont exchange it and will send mine back... I hope they just exchange it because I had one bad pixel anyway and its not bright so not covered for the 0 bright dot...


Anyway they keep saying drivers and bios will fix it but it has not... I think in the end a bios will fix it based on what I read about acer and other notebooks that had this problem, bios update resolved, but asus seems to be messing with everything... Bios, drivers and all...

Its not the touchpad drivers... The drivers have been the same for OVER A YEAR with asus and other vendors and not been an issue... They do have newer drivers dated last month even but of course they have same results.

My word is just everyone keep sending in complaints/support inq and it will make them stay on it...

 

Well I just got a call from them. Now they want to say its my OS, and want to format it... So I said I have done 5-8 formats and done with all diffrent drivers its not he OS... They say, well we want to do it...

Not to mention it did it right out of the box.

I guess we are just all to dumb to know what we are talking about... Not to mention I am a dang reseller and partner for them and I do laptop/desktop and network repair for a living.

I really have hate for this company. I know its not good to hate but they act like nothing is wrong... Than why do so many people have the problem? and if its true why do they say the new bios and drivers fixed it? well than you must know about a problem and be trying to work on it... Why must they lie?

I wish I could get my money back. I will never buy another Asus thing if they dont fix this crap before this year ends... I sure as heck aint going to resale their crap.... This is nuts. Its sad...

**Sorry about my rant, just upset.** Not to mention my desktop has an Asus board and guess what? I am sending it in for RMA... Nice huh? and its a $300 board, the Craper Extreme.... I got some bad taste I guess...

 

Wow, I can't believe this is still going on. I had not looked at this topic for some time and was hoping to finally see a solution to th keyboard lag as it started to irritate me again but it looks like no change at all. This blows.

 

Complained to Asus again. Got a different answer this time. He told me to reinstall my NVidia graphic card drivers from their site. ??????

Anyway. Did that. Rebooted. No lag yet, but it's too early to tell. Will let the computer run a bit and see what happens.

 

Just thought i would let this list that this is still a common issue on more recent models like the N50 as well. It's a complete embarrassment that Asus cannot A)Acknowledge the issue, and B)Genuinely work with Synaptics to solve the issue.

After such a long period of time it's really just pathetic to see the same issues carried over to newer models, and still affect old ones too.

I must say as i type this message i have not had a single missed keystroke, but it is mentioned by many others, and i have experienced many times before. I must say that lately it does seem to of improved since i loaded some modified Acer Synaptics drivers, but it has still happened during that time. So it's a bit of a head scratcher.

 

Hey all,

I was also having this problem on my G50vt-x1 model. Got the laptop just over a week ago.

Yesterday I upgraded the ATK_Hotkey Utility driver to version V1.0.0042 and the ASUS ATKOSD2 Utility driver to Beta Version V7.0.0002 and that seemed to really make a difference. I barely notice the keyboard lag now if at all. Sometimes I think it might just be bad typing. In any case, the percentage of missed keystrokes has gone down tremendously. I'm not sure if updating those things will help the M50 users but it's certainly seemed to help me. Specifically, I think it was the ATK_Hotkey Utility one that made the difference.

Hope that helps.

 

bios 210 is out. wdiff sees a LOT of differences between that and 209 (definitely more than what the site says was changed). ill update this with anything i find.

modules added to 210:
35.2 -> header starts with CompuTrace V80.866. this might be interesting (if its really there)... wonder why they didnt document it.

changed in 210:
06 -> bios date
08 -> idk, but it _IS_ the boot block. perhaps changes to do with adding CT?
18 -> idk, display manager
1B -> a bunch of changes to the device map. changes for CT?
21 -> changes in the text strings (maybe to do with the listed update?) (CT?)
2B -> date
55 -> 32 bit windows dll, for what idk. no imports/exports/strings. has a lot of "RTL:" and "Ldr" references.
80 -> added some info to the image info
F0 -> idk. not much of a change, probably just a checksum.
F7 -> bios info

 

By Computrace you're referring to the security/antitheft system? If so, I bet that's why it was not documented

 

I experienced the same keyboard issue on my X83vm x-1 model. I tried your recommended approach and it seems to have improved the issue. This is great because I Love the laptop itself but that issue was bothering me enough to want to take it back. Thanks for posting that David.

 

The thanx was for David by the way. Appreciate it

 

@_@ I guess I was lucky enough to not experience this keyboard lag on my M50vm.

If it helps, all my drivers are the ones at stock. If you guys would like me to check on something, Ill be glad to help

 

My laptop is actually the X83vm-x1 model. But yea, luckily the issue has improved pretty well

 

Hi Edster, and welcome to the forums!
I'm glad this worked out for you. Apparently, the issue is best tackled with a BIOS update. So far, that seems to work for most people.

 

Have a M50MV P8600 2,4GHz

Bios was updated on last repair, 1. february, Keyboard lag is still a big problem.

Uninstall synaptic mouse drivers and delete them from your HDD. And the lag-problem is 100% gone. Offcourse you now can't turn off touchpad, and the multimediafunctions does not work, but the lag is gone.

from device manager right click on touchpad driver -> properties -> Driver -> Uninstall -> Delete from HDD -> restart two times (as instruckted to) and you have microsoft standard ps2 mous-driver installed.

Dont even try getting any help from asus support......

Sorry about my English