6130 Touchpad

I had this same problem with the Synaptics touchpad on my last laptop - I rely heavily on the vertical scroll function, but sometimes it just refuses to work. Often this is rectifiable by clicking out of and then reclicking on the window (or it's tab) you want to scroll in, but sometimes not even this works. I upgraded the driver on the Averatec site, but still the problem persists. When I upgraded the driver on my last laptop, it seemed to fix the problem.

Should I just go ahead and seek out a new driver from the Synaptics website? I'm always being told by tech supports that I should only use the drivers from the laptop manufacturer's websites since they are custom tailored for their model. Is this true? Anyone else have the same problems?

 

The short answer is that I am going to backfill any drivers I'm missing on my new build of 3270 that WUPD happens to miss with the OEM versions first and then Averatec's if there's any missing after that. Whenever the devil they become available, that is.

The long answer below will explain why.

What I've noticed with my averatec products and reading other's experiences is that most of the time people are having much better luck with the OEM drivers instead of Averaec's. Usually this is not the case. IBM, Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, all those usually you definitely want to use the branded drivers. The only mixed reviews I've seen are for the WLAN drivers, but that was one for Averatec's and four for the OEM. I saw on averatecforums.com (or org?) that people are having very good luck because the OEM just realeased a new version and it apparently works well and fixes a bunch of issues.

A couple concise observations:
1. Driver customization is hella expensive. I suspect that Averatec keeps costs down by basically not doing it.
2. With the apparent lag between product release and driver availability, I would be inclined to think that already posted drivers are stale (I haven't seen any record of update on the drivers for other models and there seems to be pretty good sized intervals for their BIOS releases) and any ones that just got posted may be close to getting stale anyhow.
3. Comprehensive software testing is hella expensive as well, often more than the cost of building the driver itself. I would wager that this isn't really being done either.
4. With the seeming indifference of Averatec to technical requests outside of anything super basic (most people seem to do okay with the RMA process, but that's just plug n chug anyhow...doesn't require an engineer's time) I'm not confident they can even support it.

All this is okay for a guy like me who does this sort of stuff on a regular basis and has reasonable and clear expectations of what's invovled when ya start tearing into a computer, expecialy a notebook, but less technically inclined and/or experienced folks may be a bit daunted when there's a hiccough in the works. Everything's easy until something...isn't. Sort of like virus protection. Some folks think they don't need it, it's a scam, not worth their time, etc, until they get bit and find out just how much crap is involved with cleaning it up, and that's if the surgery is fully successful...it's even worse if you are trying to recover AFU data and have to reload machine.

God forbid that happens to anyone with one of these who's not a reasonably experienced PC jockey.

 

I just removed the Averatec factory supplied touchpad driver and went to the Synaptics website to install their latest generic pointing device driver, even though Synaptics recommends using the laptop manufacturer one.

I have to say the touchpad seems much better now. The problem with the virtual scrolling seems to be gone and it works on everything. It's also a lot faster. Another difference is that a little up/down arrow icon appears when you scroll.

I wonder which other drivers I should be replacing.