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    Struggling with ELANtech touchpad

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Suslik, Aug 6, 2012.

  1. Suslik

    Suslik Notebook Enthusiast

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    Wall of text below. Consider yourself warned.

    Previously I had a laptop with ALPS touchpad which was utterly terrible. New laptop came with Elan device which seems to be better but still has some driver issues that I'm going to discuss.

    My configuration:
    ASUS N53SM laptop
    ELANtech touchpad with device ID ETD0001
    Win7 x64
    Initial touchad driver version 7.0.5.16

    Initial problems:
    1) The driver caused touchpad to be disabled while typing
    2) Driver configuration utility did not have an option to enable one-finger scrolling aka "edge scrolling" nor does it have a desirable option called "circular scrolling" which is an extension of edge scrolling.
    3) The driver does not recognize tapping near the border of the touchpad.

    First problem can be solved relatively easily in drivers of version >10.x.x.x - the solution is to enable an option TouchPadRejection_Display in HKCU/Sofrware/Elantech/SmartPadDisplay, settings its value to 1.

    Second problem seems to be far trickier. Even though there is an option EdgeScroll_Display which lets me enable edge scrolling by configure program, scrolling just does not work after that regardless. Strangest thing is that there is only one old driver version that has this feature working correctly by default - 8.0.7.1, but that driver is too old, so it does not have neither circular scrolling nor does it allow to use touchpad while typing. Since there is one option that has properly working edge scrolling, it's not a hardware issue.

    Third problem is just weird - touchpad perfectly recognizes activity near the border, but it does not recognize it as tapping. It is probably yet another useless feature like "corner tapping" which is not used but prevents regular tapping.

    Perfect solution to me would be to install synaptics drivers which are far more reliable. I managed to install them adding my touchpad's device id to synpd.inf instead of some random synaptics id:
    Code: 
    [AsusMfg.NTamd64]
%PS2.SynCompatibleDeviceDesc% = Asus__0A00__PS2_Inst,*PNP0F13
%PS2.SynCompatibleDeviceDesc% = Asus__0A00__PS2_Inst,*SYN0002
%PS2.SynCompatibleDeviceDesc% = Asus__0A00__PS2_Inst,*SYN0A00
;%PS2.SynDeviceDesc% = Asus_GROUP1_PS2_Inst,*SYN0A01
%PS2.SynDeviceDesc% = Asus_GROUP1_PS2_Inst,*ETD0001
    ";" line is commented, next one is added by me.

    After that the driver was installed, but upon reboot the configuration had only dummy options and applications such as mood pad refused to launch with message like "Sorry this program requires a synaptics touch pad and the synaptics pointing device driver" which indicates that the driver is not recognizing my touchpad correctly.

    So I'd appreciate either direct solution to any of my 3 stated problems or a workaround as how to install synaptics driver over elan touchpad.
     
    Suslik, Aug 6, 2012
    #1
  2. Suslik

    Suslik Notebook Enthusiast

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    No one likes edge scroll. Aww : (
     
    Suslik, Aug 12, 2012
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