Synaptics driver disabled on battery power?

Hi all,

I've got an issue where when I am running on battery power, my touchpad loses its touch-based features, including the all-important tap-to-click.

Anything that requires the touchpad, aside from just moving the cursor, becomes disabled as soon as the machine goes into battery power. Changing the Windows Power Plan makes no difference. However, as soon as I plug it back into the AC adapter, those same missing Synaptic features start working again!

I am using the latest Synaptic driver directly from the Synaptic website, not Dell's own driver. In my Mouse Properties window it shows up at "SynapticsTouchpad V7.2", and my driver is 14.0.3.0

Has anyone else found out about this? Am I missing something? I couldn't find any option in the Synaptics driver/application to disable/enable on battery power.

Thanks!

 

I have the exact same touchpad and driver software, but it works just fine for me on battery, touch to click, multi-touch scrolling and all. I even tried changing my power profile to both 'balanced' and 'power saving' and it still worked fine.

 

Try updating your Synaptics driver ?

http://www.station-drivers.com/tele...touchpad_15.0.24(www.station-drivers.com).exe

 

chewyeong,

is there a difference between the Synaptics v14 and this v15 you've linked to?

i was under the impression that usually the driver from the component manufacturer should be good enough as "up to date". for example, Synaptics should always have a more up to date driver than Dell. i figured v14 was it.

i'll give this a go, see how it goes.

 

unfortunately the driver you provided, chewyeong, doesn't make a difference either. when going on battery power, i lose my Synaptic touchpad enhancement features, including tap-to-touch (which is very important to me, as i'm lazy enough not to use the physical left-click).

i'm going to contact both Dell support and Synaptics. see if i can get two different stories/explanations for this, and play a game of Clue to find the real culprit.

I think Colonel Mustard did it.

 

just thought i'd update on this issue:

for some strange reason, re-installing the v14.0.3.0 driver worked.

what happened? dunno

i uninstalled the 14.0.3.0 driver i was having issues with, then installed the 15.0.24 driver thatchewyeong90 kindly linked to. this driver had the same problem, and then some - it would spontaneously crash on me every now and then (mostly random, but for some reason loading up MS VS 2010 caused it to crash everytime). so i went ahead and uninstalled v15 and just went back to the v14.0.3.0 driver found directly on Synaptic's own website. after re-installing this v14 driver, the original issue went away! i can now tap-to-click while on battery mode, and enhancement features such as two-finger scrolling and that chiralscroll also work.

don't really know what happened, but i'm glad it's working again!

[on a side note, i wonder if perhaps my original update to v14.0.3.0 driver was a little faulty, and by installing v15 it corrected/replaced that faulty whatever-it-is, allowing me to "repair" my install later on?]