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.

Like I wrote in my OP, I don't miss the gestures. In fact, I couldn't care less about them. What is driving me nuts is that I cannot install ANY drivers. At all. The installer package just "does something" for two seconds and then notifies success, but no drivers are installed. A skeleton (almost empty), extremely shallow directory structure (with at most a few files) is created for Synaptics under Program Files and nothing more than the Synaptics HID Device is added under Device Manager -> Human Interface Devices. I should note that the Synaptics driver package is several megabytes and contains several services, which all exist as executables with the installer (although the official download seems to be lacking those, which seems odd in its own right).

Device Settings like this never appear for me:

[attachment=30096:1_en_mouse_properties.jpg]

In short, no driver is installed and therefore there pretty much literally is no previous driver to uninstall. The only device I can see under mouse settings is a generic HID device.

I should not need to contact support to install a bloody touchpad driver.

Seriously - I knew I would likely have a hard time with the touchpad, because I've been through this before, but I've never seen anything this messed up as far as glaring inexplicabilities go.

As far as downloading the correct drivers, Acer's support page (at least on the surface) is pretty user-friendly. You really don't need to be a genius to use it:

[attachment=30095:acersupport.jpg]

The driver version is not the latest, but should be okay. Just to check, I've tried installing the complete driver bundle from Synaptic's home page (as well as older versions) and they behave in exactly the same way.

I cannot install ANY drivers. At all.

...nothing more than the Synaptics HID Device is added under Device Manager -> Human Interface Devices.

I had a buddy with the exact same issue you're describing, also on an Acer laptop. The touchpad on his system actually was not a Synaptics touchpad, but a touchpad from a company called Elan. I remember digging up a matching driver after figuring out which model and version it required and forcing windows to install it (it did in fact complain that it was not the right driver for the device). Touchpad worked like a charm after that.

Try a few things:

- In Device Manager, do the "Scan for hardware changes" thing. CHECK

- Try manual driver installation using the device manager and point it at any INF files if those got put in that program files folder. CHECK

- Check Services to see if there's anything listed. HMM - WILL SEE

- Check Event Viewer to see if any errors are being reported by the driver. GOOD IDEA

- Try running those random EXEs in the program files folder. CHECK - I THINK THEY NEED THE INSTALLED DRIVER

That IS the driver. Properties pages on the device or in the mouse/touchpad settings dialog are separate. It's possible they haven't bothered adding anything other than the bare-bones stuff to the Win10 version yet. Non-enthusiast driver developers (even Intel!) tend to follow the "Does it work even slightly? DONE! SHIP IT!" mentality.

That's what one would think, right? The problem is it has a generic name and doesn't show up in Control Panel -> Mouse properties. Eg it's just an inf file that I can't even enable. I would expect it to show up as in the screenshot above (eg as something like "Synaptics TouchPad V19" or whatnot). BTW - uninstalling the default HID device disables the touchpad.

Also, none of the peripheral components that come with the full driver package are installed during setup (eg the config utility or service executables) - as I mentioned, the install folder is pretty much empty.

So Windows defaults to its own High Precision Touchpad settings, which you can kinda-sorta configure from the Metro UI. Frankly I don't know why there are two settings panels (that and the Control Panel one) or how they correlate.

I had a buddy with the exact same issue you're describing, also on an Acer laptop. The touchpad on his system actually was not a Synaptics touchpad, but a touchpad from a company called Elan. I remember digging up a matching driver after figuring out which model and version it required and forcing windows to install it (it did in fact complain that it was not the right driver for the device). Touchpad worked like a charm after that.

Yeah - I've had this exact same problem with Elantech drivers, too, and I, too, eventually got it working. The difference was that while Elan drivers were largely borked, they at least installed something that resembled something useful. The touchpad was, in fact, awesome after I got it working.

I'm very much trying to not jump the boat and blame one company or the other here, but frankly I can't understand how something this common hasn't been standardized yet. It's not like touchpads from across the world come in overly exotic shapes and sizes - they're just AD converters that interpret touch signals into digital ones. Furthermore, I'm not a Linux user, but I think someone mentioned on a forum that touchpad drivers are bundled as one package on Linux (or at least on Ubuntu).

All I can understand right now is that Windows is using its own driver and the only reason I can think of other than that the OS preventing the drivers package from being properly installed, is a mismatching driver. Why it then skips the actual installation and reports success is beyond me...

had a buddy with the exact same issue you're describing, also on an Acer laptop. The touchpad on his system actually was not a Synaptics touchpad, but a touchpad from a company called Elan.

I was going to say: this has all the hallmarks of a device not being recognized by the driver. Either (1) it's not a Synaptics device at all or (2) a new device has been substituted by the ODM to save a few pennies and the device ID isn;t recognized by the driver. You need to check the manufacturer and device ID codes to make sure they're what you extect.

I can't understand how something this common hasn't been standardized yet.

Well, the devices are standard. They follow the Microsoft HID device guidelines (which is a lot more than just an ADC making handwaving gestures towards the little homunculus that pulls all the levers inside the putty-grey box). All trackpads and multi-touch input devices in general will work the way they're supposed to, which does not actually include multi-touch gestures used for pointer emulation and system-level and application-level navigation. They just have to report touch events.

What doesn't seem to work for you is the Synaptics gesture recognition technology. A lot of non-Synaptics multi-touch input devices do not report all the events required for Synaptics' proprietary gesture recognition. It really sounds like you do not have a Synaptics device in there.

had a buddy with the exact same issue you're describing, also on an Acer laptop. The touchpad on his system actually was not a Synaptics touchpad, but a touchpad from a company called Elan.

I was going to say: this has all the hallmarks of a device not being recognized by the driver. Either (1) it's not a Synaptics device at all or (2) a new device has been substituted by the ODM to save a few pennies and the device ID isn;t recognized by the driver. You need to check the manufacturer and device ID codes to make sure they're what you extect.

It's possible they haven't bothered adding anything other than the bare-bones stuff to the Win10 version yet. Non-enthusiast driver developers (even Intel!) tend to follow the "Does it work even slightly? DONE! SHIP IT!" mentality.

Synaptic touchpads do work on Win10. Granted, it was preinstalled by OEM on Win8.1 and then I upgraded to Win10, and there was an issue where all the Synaptic settings were lost every time the device powered down... but that was a result from a bad value in a registry key the Synaptic driver failed to reset (it was literally named "DeleteUserSettingOnUpgrade" ), so manually setting it to false fixed the issue.

(And ten thousand Mac users are laughing at this thread. )

It's possible they haven't bothered adding anything other than the bare-bones stuff to the Win10 version yet. Non-enthusiast driver developers (even Intel!) tend to follow the "Does it work even slightly? DONE! SHIP IT!" mentality.

Synaptic touchpads do work on Win10. Granted, it was preinstalled by OEM on Win8.1 and then I upgraded to Win10, and there was an issue where all the Synaptic settings were lost every time the device powered down... but that was a result from a bad value in a registry key the Synaptic driver failed to reset (it was literally named "DeleteUserSettingOnUpgrade" ), so manually setting it to false fixed the issue.

(And ten thousand Mac users are laughing at this thread. )

For once I have to grant you that I understand the Apple crowd. But just this once.

I'll try the reg key!

Interestingly even Belarc Advisor tells me pretty much nothing useful aside from the generic HID device listed under Device Manager. Acer's own hardware detector only detects the LAN card manufacturer. Then again it does seem pretty dated.

What utility could I use to check the manufacturer ID? It would be utterly idiotic, but it's possible Acer themselves don't know what device they used.

Check in Device Manager. Find your touchpad there (probably under "Mice and other pointing devices"), right-click, Properties, Details tab, drop-down on "Property" and pick "Hardware Ids".