Does your Synaptics touchpad driver sometimes stop working in Windows 8?

Does your Synaptics touchpad driver sometimes stop working in Windows 8?

My GF has been having issues with hers almost weekly. Nothing a reboot won't reset but it's annoying when she's in the middle of a game.

I just want to get an idea if this is a common issue or maybe just her machine and I have to Dell about this.

My m17x has Synaptics too and the driver has pooped out a few times but no where near as often as hers.

We're both on Win 8 Pro x64

 

Have you tried re-installing the driver?

Synaptics Touchpad Driver

 

Thanks Luis, Dell's drivers were the first drivers we used. It's not made for Windows 8, which is why we thought it didn't work right. There are no Windows 8 options in the Dell drivers.

As Synaptics has been releasing updates to their drivers almost monthly since Jan (which include options for Windows 8 features), we've been updating everytime.

However, it seems like these touchpad drivers, whether from Dell or Synaptics, is quite unstable in her M14xR2 and just slightly unstable in my M17x R4.

People who have stable touchpad drivers, what OS are you using?

 

I have the m17x r4, what do you mean by is being unstable? Never had any issues with mine tbh (I have been using latest synaptics drivers for windows 8)

 

It's weird, I haven't seen the issue. Did you buy it with Win8?

 

By unstable, I mean the driver stops working. The behavior is like this:

When you touch the touchpad, the cursor erratically jumps about 2-3" to the top right of its original position. This sometimes happens on my M17x R4 but it happens on my GF's m14x R2 a lot. She games a lot and it's really annoying for her to have to reboot in the middle of Sims or Farmville 2.

It makes it really difficult to move the cursor because when you "let go of" and touch the touchpad, it repeats this "cursor jumping" behavior. So, you have to try to move the cursor where you want it to go in one continuous motion. If you let go and touch again, it'll jump to a different position on the screen (to the top right of the original position, to be more accurate).

You can touch anywhere on the pad and it will jump 2-3" in the top right direction.

Our machines came with Win 7 Ultimate x64 but we both upgraded to Win 8 Pro x64 when Microsoft had their $15 upgrade deal. We both did clean installs.

The next time it happens on her machine, I will video record it.

It's really disappointing. Except for this touchpad and wifi issues (wifi will drop at random), the m14x R2 is the perfect laptop for her. Small size, she freakin loves the keyboard and it has 900p and enuff graphics oomph for her games.

She used to game on the L502x and that model gave her no troubles whatsoever (except the gfx was starting to feel slow & could never get 30fps @ 1080p w/o turning a lot of stuff down), although, we do miss the FREAKING AMAZING speakers that were on that model (and the L702x -- the one I was using before I upgraded as well).

If you guys could PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE bring back those JBL's into the next revisions of Alienware laptops, then crap...we'll have to sell our current machines on ebay, and skip going out for steak dinners until we can afford to upgrade again.

I know the M18x R2 has a sub (my cousin just bought that model) but it's too big for either of us.

 

when i come back from sleep, sometimes my brightness control doesn't work

 

Go to control panel --> mouse
enhance pointer precision.

That should help.

 

I found this:

Synaptics Touchpad stops working windows 8 | Windows 8

and this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/76070-35-erratic-synaptics-touchpad

BTW, for others reading, the suggestion in Post #8 did not work for me on 3 different machines.

 

Mine stopped working for the first time the other day. I just closed the lappy and opened it back up... fixed in 10 seconds.