Samsung Series 9 issues - touchpad freezes from time to time

Any of you experiencing this? It's particularly pronounced when using the samsung easy software manager to update software (sound driver for example).

But even in chrome (with nothing else running).. I'm experiencing this perhaps once every 5-10 minutes (the longest) or as frequent as once every other time i use the trackpad to move around the screen.

i'm very happy with everything else about the laptop (and growing to like the keyboard), but this trackpad thing is driving me nuts.

Anyone experienced this and found a solution to fix it?

Edit: i have the NP900X4C, i5 & 8GB version, bought from amazon.

 

Which touchpad driver version (Easy Software Manager will tell you)? The latest is, I think, 10.7.17.5 which is available here. Can you try using a mouse and see if you experience similar problems. If not, we can be fairly sure it the problem is with the touchpad driver. Also use the BIOS update program to check if your BIOS is up-to-date.

On a related subject, I have a problem with the touchpad sometimes not responding when the computer resumes from sleep / hibernation. The fix is to shut the lid, wait a minute and open it again. I'm downloading the latest touchpad driver which my ESM doesn't want to find for me and will see if the problem goes away.

John

 

Thanks for the note on the updated touchpad driver. I just installed 10.7.17.5 and I also plugged in my logitech mx anywhere mouse as a test. Unfortunately I have to report that it appears the problem is indeed touchpad driver related. the mouse works just fine. I can't quite work out why the touchpad driver/software is freezing (sometimes alt-tab from windows explorer to chrome would trigger the freeze).. but in any case, as soon as I feel the touchpad freezing, I would try the mouse and mouse is clearly working.. at that point, i'll try the touchpad, sometimes the freeze clears up by the time i go back to touchpad and sometimes it doesn't.

i think this will be a dealbreaker for me.. love everything else about this machine. what a shame!

 

Your problem seems to be rare and I would persevere with this issue for a little longer. Something may be corrupted. My first action would be to reset the settings to default. Note that ETDAniConf.exe in the installer package provides a much more comprehensive set of options than Samsung's installation which provides ETDSimpleUI.exe as the touchpad control panel.

A further step of troubleshooting would be to completely uninstall the touchpad driver and remove any Elan entries from the registry before reinstalling the latest driver.

John

 

alright.. i'll try what you are suggesting. gonna do a system recovery and then uninstall whatever elan entries and try that.

 

This may or may not apply to you, but I was having problem playing games until I deleted most of this (Software Launcher MCE Update Easy Support Center Easy Software manager Easy Settings Easy Migration Easy File Share) crapware. Now it's 1,000,000%

 

I also took Heresy's advice and uninstalled most of the samsung stuff (except for easy settings). the mouse freeze seems to have gone away. I haven't done any update yet (except for touchpad, which was through John's link). Gonna test it tonight with all of the updates and see what happens.. but good so far..

 

If you delete Easy Software Manager, how do you get your driver updates?
Do you just check the downloads every now and then?

 

Well yea, here. I'd rather the hassle than put up with owning a laptop I can't play with.

 

well.. i got the freezing issue again. i haven't done any updates but moving my data over to the laptop and installing things like chrome, opera, eclipse, vmware, etc.. meh. this is getting annoying.

 

Did you try uninstalling the touchpad drivers and rebooting?

 

i have the same problem, sometimes it freezes for a number of minutes giving me no option but to force restart.
it seemed to start after i installed my wacom tablet and now use both.
Since then, i've also gotten the blue screen a few times too, and the usb connection simply stops working from time to time (i cant even plug something else in), until i restart

have you had any luck??

 

I'm also having intermittent touchpad freezing problems. Very frustrating! External mouse works fine.

I've re-installed Windows, and at first the touchpad worked fine. Then I started adding drivers and Samsung software one by one to see if there is a particular driver that is causing the problems. Touchpad continued to work fine until a few days after the reinstallation of Windows, when it started intermittently freezing again!

One by one I have rolled back and uninstalled Samsung software and drivers. Now the only Samsung software I have is Easy Settings. I have removed all Intel drivers except for the Wifi and USB 3.0 drivers.

The touchpad has just frozen right now as I write this!

Any ideas or suggestions? Getting desperate...

 

My suggestion would be to re-install the touchpad driver one more time, then leave things alone for a while, and see if the issue is gone. From my own experience, I have a hunch that the issue is in fact caused by the boot optimization settings in the EasySettings software. On the Boot Management tab there, click on Advanced, then the Settings button, and make sure "Adjust device startup time" is unchecked. No guarantees, but maybe that'll do the trick.

 

Aside from making sure you have the latest BIOS (run the BIOS updater program) I would ask is your touchpad freezing mid-session or happens sometimes on resume from sleep / hibernation? I ask this because I have an ongoing issue of my touchpad not working sometimes on resuming. The fix is to close the computer for a minute then open it again.

Samsung support have come up with their usual suggestion to restore the factory image. I haven't yet got round to pointing out that since the sleep / hibernation is handled by the Intel Rapid Start Technology completely outside of Windows then I consider the touchpad's failure to wake up to be a system problem.

John

 

My system does the same thing. When I sometimes resume from sleep, the touchpad no longer functions. I have to close the lid and open it again to fix the issue.

 

Same here on my series 5. Resume -> No Touchpad
-> Sometimes it comes up again after a few seconds, when not it helps to close the lid and wait 5 seconds.
Then after reopening it comes back.
This totally sucks!!!!!!!!!

 

Has anyone found a solution. I have the same problem with the latest BIOS and Drivers installed. The Touchpad freezes almost every minute. Sometimes it takes to 2-3 Minutes to start functioning again. This is no working condition . Do I have to send the Notebook back? Any Solution?

 

I've also now noticed this on my X4C when running without a mouse but the period with no response is maybe 10 seconds. I think we need to bombard Samsung support about this since it could be related to the other problem of not responding after resume (which I consider to be a BIOS problem) or it may be a driver issue. Don't accept Samsung's usual recipe of reverting to the factory version of Windows. Tell them that others are suffering the same frustrations.

John

 

Hi, I have trackpad issues as well, mine doesn't freeze though. Sorry if this is off topic but I prefer asking it here rather than open up a new thread. I just bought the 15'' series 9 and my problem is the noise the trackpad makes when clicked... it's louder and different from the noise of other trackpads, and the strangest thing is that the right and left click don't sound the same. Also if I tap it (not click it) with a bit more force than is necessary it actually makes a different sound depending on where I tap (toward the center is where the noise is most noticeable). I'm starting to think there's something broken in there! What noises are you getting from your trackpads? I didn't pay little for this computer (which by the way is impressing me in every other feature) and I'd like to know whether I should send it back... thanks for the info.

 

The whole pad is clickable except along the top edge and the clicking involves some physical movement. The clicks on my X4C all (left and right buttons and the pad) sound similar.

John

 

Interesting. The same thing happened to my NP900X3C while my gf was browsing on chrome.
Touchpad stopped responding so I did a reboot, uninstalled drivers and grabbed the new drivers from samsung's website.

Going to have to test it tomorrow during class but this issue never came up before today. The only thing Ive updated recently was Samsung software update manager so maybe that's the culprit.

 

A mitigating measure for periodic pad non-responsiveness that I suggested in another thread is to go into Task Manager and raise the priority of ETDCtrl.exe and ETDCtrlHelper.exe to High. This appeared to reduce these problems for me. However, these changes do not persist after a reboot.

John

 

Wanted to thank everyone for the troubleshooting tips here...

I was experiencing the non-responsive touchpad problem... Nothing seemed to work (driver reinstall, driver removal, prioritization of of the ETDCtrl and ETDCtrlHelper processes), so I removed all the "Samsung-related" programs on the Series 9 (EasySettings, EasyFileTransfer, EasySoftwareUpdate, etc).

Happy to report that the touchpad works like a champ now. Have had several hours and several reboots with full functionality.

Tradeoff is that I have to do manual driver updates and I lose functionality of the top-row function buttons (in blue), but I'll happily navigate into Windows settings for those in order to gain a responsive touchpad.

George

 

See this thread for guidance about which component to install to get the Fn keys working.

John

 

I wish that I could report similar success. I was experiencing this issue, and so I did a clean install of Win7 - no samsung software at all. I have installed only the Intel chips driver, and Intel display, and the wifi card driver (driver only), and firebox.

No joy. I still have the issue.

Samsung suggests I send it in for service.

 

This is not a rare or unusual issue! I have a "New Series 9" with an ELAN touchpad. It freezes frequently. REturned one unit within 2 weeks of purchase. Second unit I was convinced it was just a driver and would get fixed. After a few months with no update I contacted Samsung support. Had to send the unit in. Got it back. Same problem. I would not recommend any Samsung computer using an ELAN touch pad. I am now going to go back to Samsung to see how they would like to resolve the issue.

 

It's several days since I installed the newest Elan driver and, so far, have not noticed re-occurrence of these issues.

John

 

Hi,
I wanted to ask if the issue has been resolved? I've had the same issue with my laptop. Did a clean install of windows 7 and installed the latest drivers and no success. It still occasionally freezes.
However i noticed something very peculiar. If i press gently (without clicking) on the far left of the touchpad and just use the touchpad normally with my other hand while i'm still pressing, it goes out of freeze mode and works just fine. I do this every time it freezes. Makes me wonder if it's some sensor issue.

 

It's either coincidence or is a hardware problem. I would suggest you contact Samsung support.

John

 

Hi John,

Would you be able to clarify which driver you're currently using please ? 11.7.10.4 is on my 900x3d (via SW update) but no joy with the freezing on resume issue

Thanks !

 

I updated to 11.7.10.4 a couple of days ago. Everything seems to be running OK.

John

 

Hi guys,

I wanted to see that if the people are having issues with this problem have checked their event viewer to see if they see any of these errors:

The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period


I ordered a notebook for one of my customers, model: NP900X3C-A04US, and he informed me yesterday it's freezing a lot. After looking at the event viewer he has a ton of these errors. From my googling today others that had the same issue had issues with freezing. Others have resolved the issue with a few different fixes, and I might try and resolve the issue by modifying registry strings/power saving settings to see if it fixes things. I just wanted to see if anybody else has the same errors in their event viewer. Thanks!

 

I would have expected the \IDE device to be a storage device.

Might your customer's X3C have the Sandisk U100 SSD? That SSD chokes on multiple concurrent reading and writing (they thought they could get away with a miniscule cache) and, if the RAM is already full, loading a new program with data can trigger writing to the swap file at the same time. This effectively causes the computer to freeze for a few seconds while it sorts out the indigestion on the SSD usage.

If IntelliMemory is installed then turf it out since it is also competing for scarce RAM. That might sufficiently reduce the likelihood of the event occurring that it no longer happens. The better fixes are either more RAM (impossible) or a better SSD. There's been no report here of anyone getting a better SSD out of Samsung on account of this problem. Some of us put in a bigger SSD because we need more space.

John

 

Hi John,

My customers notebook has a Liteon LMT0256M6M drive installed. I haven't been able to find any information on it besides being linked to being in some Dell notebooks. I can't even find it on Liteon's site. I'll look at IntelliMemory also. Thanks!

 

Benchmark results show the Liteon SSD is a good one so that scuppers my theory. However, it will still be worthwhile uninstalling IntelliMemory which is competing for scarce RAM.

Last year, when I suffered short periods of non-responsiveness of the touch pad (at random and not related to loading programs / data) then I raised the priority of the pad-related processes.

Also check that SW Update is being used to get the latest drivers.

John

 

I have send the Laptop back to Samsung only to get a note from the repair team, that everithing is OK and that next time they will send me a bill for loosing their time. They tested the Laptop and couldn't find any problem. I can imagine that testing looked a lot like: startup - mouse is moving - shutdown.
How can i reproduce the problem, because i will send the laptop back agin if i can achieve that. Some ideas? How to prove, that the trackpad problem exist?

 

Downgrading to version 11.7.5.7 on my NP900X3D-A01US solved the issue of touchpad freezing when writing data to the SSD which seems poorly manufactured.