Vaio S touchpad unresponsive

I have a vaio s series, and I'm running windows 8.1 right now. I just got this laptop in August, but I've been having problems with the keyboard/touchpad becoming unresponsive since it arrived. I fixed the keyboard problems, but now my touchpad is completely unresponsive. I have re-installed the driver multiple times (the synaptic touch pad driver) and my computer registers no errors with the driver, and no viruses with malwarebytes.

What happens is that I have the driver installed, from the manufacturers website, and then restart the computer as the installer says. The touchpad starts to work fine (if a little slow initially), until I close the lid of the laptop (which puts it in sleep mode). When I open the laptop again the touchpad is completely unresponsive and continues to be unresponsive even after restarting the computer. The only thing that will fix this is to, yet again, re-install this driver. To be clear, the touchpad becomes unresponsive after closing the lid and putting the laptop to sleep, but if I shut down the computer with the functioning touchpad then the touchpad will still function when I turn it back on. This problem only happens with the closing of the lid. At this point I am getting tired of re-installing this driver as nothing else I do has any effect.
Does anyone know what else I can do?

 

Perhaps it's a hardware issue? The connector might have become disconnected. was it working before the upgrade to 8.1?