I'm guessing this is a Windows issue. Because if it isn't, then it should be.

I recently bought a new laptop with a Synaptics touchpad. The unit came without an OS, so I purchased a copy of Windows 10 to go with it. Everything worked pretty much out of the box as advertised - it's not great, but it's not bad either. Except for one thing. The bloody touchpad.

As a precaution I should say that I'm using an Acer product.

I also want to mention that the touchpad "works", including two finger scrolling, although there's no gestures and I have no idea what the three-finger motion is supposed to do. I guess it's supposed to "show the desktop", although it doesn't restore windows properly. What frustrates me to hell about it all, though, is that despite the precision touchpad, the touchpad is not precise.

While moving the cursor feels almost decent some of the time, releasing a tap often causes a 5-30 pixel jump of the cursor and any item that is currently being controlled jumps with it (try positioning the caret like this), scrolling accelerates in a really unnatural way so it makes using the mouse unnecessarily imprecise and, worst of all, about 10-20% of the time (on some controls almost always) no taps are registered as clicks, so it becomes necessary to move the mouse and then either tap several times or click the left touchpad button, often also several times. It is SO easy to overshoot with touchpad acceleration - at low granularity moving the finger only slightly will either not move the cursor at all or cause a jump of tens of pixels, which is then accelerated to an even greater jump, which overshoots several lines of text, making pointing a horrible ordeal.

On their support page Acer provides a 1.3MB driver package for the touchpad, which installs, but does nothing. The device still shows up as a generic HID device with an additional Synaptics HID device entry under Device Manager. I installed a full driver package from Synaptics, which is 240MB uncompressed, but that, too, fastforwards through the installation wizard in about 2-3 seconds and tells me both of the cryptic device drivers are up to date and usable. They are not.

All the while there's no Synaptics entry under Add/Remove Features, not mouse/touchpad config tab under Control Panel, Mouse (the mouse still shows up as a generic HID device and there are not explicit touchpad settings) and no Synaptics entry in the Control Panel list. It's like the drivers say they installed, but they didn't.

So I dug deeper - I opened up the touchpad and mouse settings under the metro UI and I tweaked what few options are exposed. But it's not enough. So I opened up regedit and found a literally empty Synaptics entry with only a couple of generic fields. Googling led me to several more exotic solutions, like using an older driver, which "installs" slightly differently, but ultimately fails to install as well, disabling driver signature signing, which has zero effect, and using an external mouse, which is just idiotic.

Ultimately I can't understand which is to blame - Acer for completely borking up something as simple as touchpad integration (er - connecting a cable can't be that hard, can it?), Synaptics for writing really crappy drivers or Windows for enforcing their generic Precision Touchpad settings, which are useful for crap all. After 15 years of building laptops this should be one of the simplest things to get right, but I STILL find myself in a situation where I have to use a bloody mouse. Which I often can't on the road, rendering a 1000 euro laptop useless for any sort of real work.

As for Acer, my previous laptop as an Acer and it worked just fine until its display failed for physical reasons. With that in mind, my favorite part is this thread on Acer's support page, which is exactly about the problem I'm touting, yet is closed with such elegant dickishness that I want to set my laptop on fire out of principle.

Aaaaaaaaarh!

Have you considered sending it back to the retailer and getting a different brand out of principle?

I can't - I'm leaving the country for two months in 9 days. And I need a laptop with me.

Sounds like a hardware rather than software issue to me. Anecdotally, I've used Windows 10 on a number of machines with a number of different touchpads, and found it's support to be rock solid: it even managed to tame a dreaded ALPS touchpad (and if you think you have it bad now, at least you don't have an ALPS).

I've experienced some wierdness with my touchpad (Lenovo W530) recently -- it worked perfectly well under Windows 8.1, and perfectly well when I Upgraded to Windows 10, but its since taken a turn about a month or so ago. Its become jumpy in certain contexts (two finger scrolling), and it also will sometimes stop responding to movement for 3-4 seconds, but a physical button-press or nudging the track-point will bring it right back. Its quite annoying and I can't wait for it to go away. Using a mouse in the meantime.

and they expect all users to be ready to give up and buy a new Surface and get along with reduced functionality. They're trying to kill off the desktop (and the laptop and its touchpad).

Microsoft is simplifying Windows, and dropping lots of features and support for features. They expect all computers to have touchscreens (they expect all computers to be Surfaces) and they expect all users to be ready to give up and buy a new Surface and get along with reduced functionality. They're trying to kill off the desktop (and the laptop and its touchpad).

None of my computers have touchscreens, and they run Win10 fine, and the lack of touchscreen goes entirely invisible to me.
One of the computers is a laptop with a touchpad that has gestures, so no, gestures were not removed from Windows 10.

They didn't drop "lots of features", they removed a few features, and added new features, like they've done in every OS.

No, they don't expect all computers to be Surfaces, nor are they trying to kill off the desktop, laptop, or touchpad. That's either hyperbole, or conspiracy theory. In either case, to the best of my knowledge, it's false. Microsoft would love for (Microsoft-dominated) desktops and laptops to re-surge, so they don't have to compete in the (Apple/Google dominated) tablet and smartphone market. Further, the Microsoft Surface has a touchpad on it.

The gestures @irreversible is missing is probably gestures provided by the Synaptic driver itself, rather than built into Windows. That's how it is on my laptop. So he's having trouble installing the drivers. Perfectly understandable, because driver support on Windows is a legitimate complaint and always has been, going back decades (literally two decades - Win95 and earlier). This is because the drivers are created by third party companies (in this case, Synaptic) and are "supported" by those companies only to the extent that those companies deem it profitable, so sometimes hardware conflicts occur. This isn't Microsoft's fault, and has been a thorn in Microsoft's side for (as mentioned) over two decades.

In this case, the clearest approach to solving the problem is to contact Acer's tech support, tell them that their integrated touchpad isn't supporting gestures, ask them what the appropriate driver is for that model laptop with Win10 (they may even offer to mail you the driver disc, but it may not get to you in time - might as well have them send it anyway, unless they want to charge you for it like HP does), uninstall the previous driver before installing the new one, then configure the gestures because they may not be configured out of the box. You can plug in a USB mouse in the meantime.