Inspiron 1525 touchpad sucks.... how to make it better?

I was on a friend's brand-new inspiron 1525 today. After I began using it, I immediately noticed just how awful the touchpad is. It is extremely inprecise. It's almost as if the sensitivity is constantly changing as I use the touchpad. I don't remember if I tried adjusting the settings; if I did, it didn't help.

I soon discovered that if you move your finger in a perfectly straight horizontal motion across the touchpad (no vertical motion), the cursor, as it's moving across the screen, will also 'bounce" up and down, getting worse towards the right side of the tochpad. It doesn't abruptly jump at all; rather, it's as if the linearity of the touchpad is WAY off.

My question, then, is how do you calibrate/fix it? I suspect it may be a hardware issue, but I've heard that the Dell touchpads/touchpad drivers aren't very good to begin with, either. For all I know, however, my other hand may have been interfering with the touchpad (I discovered that this was very easy to do on the 1525's touchpad).

 

There are several different things you can modify on the touch pad. You can modify the touchpad speed, touchpad sensitivity, tapping speed and enable or disable something called touchcheck. You can also enable tap to click and draglock. All this is done under Touch Pad settings. You can also enable scrolling and adjust the width of scrolling. So i guess you definately have to customize it to your liking. I had touchpads period so i always use a bluetooth mouse.

 

I dont know what touchpad that uses, but my 1420 uses an alps touchpad and randomly it will stop working almost altogether for 5 minutes at a time and then start working again.

If the laptop is still under warranty, Dell might fix it under warranty.

 

Hey, just got my 1525 and im having the exact same problem you described. I spent an hour with dell support and they reinstalled the drivers twice but nothing helped. Can someone post up there touchpad settings? otherwise I think its a hardware issue.

Thanks

 

Please see http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=363610 As it fixed the touch pad problem for me.

 

I returned two XPS 1530's during the 21 day warranty period because of the crappy Alps touchpad freezing/stalling. I tried my hardest to fix the problem, to no avail. Reinstalled all the other major drivers, clean installs, tried at least 10 or more other drivers, and different driver brands. Nothing fixed the problem.

I will never buy another laptop with an Alps touchpad.

I had owned several other Dell laptops with Synaptics touchpads which worked perfectly. Alps touchpads are just plain junk.

Because of the Alps touchpad, I switched to a Lenovo T500.