What the hell happened to Windows touchpad support? (driver rant)

Max Optional · 2015-12-31T17:43:53

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!

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Started by irreversible December 29, 2015 09:34 AM

21 comments, last by Stefan Fischlschweiger 8 years, 8 months ago

Unduli

2,498

December 30, 2015 05:59 PM

After checking device ID (usually in Ven_XXX&Dev_YYY&Subsys_ZZZZZZ or VID_XXX&PID_YYY&Subsys_ZZZ format) you can seek a compatible driver. On my own, few times I had to use driver with another subsystem number by manually removing subsystem info at inf files.

mostates by moson?e | Embrace your burden

21st Century Moose

13,459

December 31, 2015 10:01 AM

The other thing is that you can search the web for the "VEN_XXX" code and find out which vendor your touchpad actually is from. As others have said upthread, it sure sounds like it's not actually a synaptics, so this is useful information.

Direct3D has need of instancing, but we do not. We have plenty of glVertexAttrib calls.