Touchpad Frustration... no physical buttons

This post is from HPs site, but it explains my frustrations very clearly:

It seems there is a flaw in the touchpad drivers. If you use two hands on the touch pad, one to move the mouse and another to click the buttons, it becomes unusable.

This touchpad has physical click buttons that double as part of the touch area. If you leave one finger physically resting on a button, it messes with another finger trying to move the mouse. Worse yet, even if you change the way you use it so you use one finger to move the mouse and touch the buttons only when lifting this finger, it becomes impossible to highlight text.

Since in order to highlight text, you have to keep the physical button pushed in while trying to move the mouse. The pad basically sees this as a tap or something and breaks the dragging so the highlight area stops growing as you move the mouse.

It would seem the drivers need to have a setting to either virtually shrink the area of the pad that is used for mouse movements so any area outside of this area is not used. Or needs to be self aware of physical buttons and have a toggle to not activate the touch area above the buttons.

I have tried to see if I could maybe set a scroll area or any other area over the area of the buttons to help alleiviate this problem, but none of these attempted tricks have worked. Using one finger to move and another to touch the physical buttons just breaks everything and makes the pad unusuable.

Any ideas of a fix, in ubuntu the drivers allow you to select areas to be nontouchable, so it is definitely possible. At this point I'm ready to return the laptop over this one thing, and I love it for every other thing on it.

 

I noticed this as well.

Solution: Use double tap to select text.

 

i agree with levi. you gota lose the habit.

 

I just double tap and drag, I find I almost never use the actual buttons. But I do believe the reason that the touchpad becomes inoperable is because of the gestures, which utilize two fingers on the touchpad to initiate.

 

I actually have had really strange experiences with the click-dragging.

On the first Envy 15 I had that I exchanged, if I clicked and held down the button and tried dragging and moving the mouse multiple times, the dragging would break each time the mouse was moved as if a tap were registered and the highlight would stop growing, just like you mentioned.

However, on the second, exchange Envy 15 I got, if I tried dragging and moving the mousee multiple times, the highlight box would actually keep growing and I can continue dragging. I was using the same drivers and touchpad settings on both Envys.

I originally thought it may have been that the touchpad on my first Envy was defective, but it seems like this is common among other people. Can anyone else confirm similar experiences?

 

Might you be able to put aluminum foil tape over the button area to prevent (or at least reduce) the touchpads ability to sense a finger??

 

It works fine on my dv9000 but it has an older Synaptics touchpad (v6.3), maybe the bug only appears with latest ones.

 

The envys have a totally different touchpad with no separate buttons

 

Touch pad on Envy 14 sucks. It's not a multitouch phone, it's a damn notebook. Give me real buttons that are separate so I can multitouch that thang! Or at least give me the choice of making the "button" areas non mousing areas.