Dell Inspiron 5000 series - odd touchpad

[katz]

Dell Inspiron 5000 series laptop. Nothing special. Win 10, 4 gb ram, 1.8 cpu. Ran malware cleaners, nothing much came up, tweaking tool, sdi to bring drivers up to date.

Odd touchpad issue, to me anyway.

It is the all smooth type, with a "painted" line that separates the buttons. The issue is, the touchpad only works thru light presses, almost like, super light taps on the buttons. If you press the button hard, like on a "normal" touchpad, nothing happens. You can also lightly press on either side of the entire pad, and it will react just like a button press.

I've been thru all the settings, and I can't find any way to change the adjustment. Is this normal behavior for this model? I've works on hundreds of Dells and others, and I don't recall any of them that functioned this way - or at least, that you didn't have the option to set the pad to standard behavior.

 

[phaZed]

No, that's not normal. It sounds like a failed touchpad to me.

 

[katz]

No, that's not normal. It sounds like a failed touchpad to me.

And of course, the client "doesn't remember" if it worked like that before. How can you use the laptop and not remember...lol. I know, we get used to how things work, but this is super odd...

 

[phaZed]

Ya I get those type of people, too. Ya, really, you don't know!? Some people are very disconnected from things in their lives, or even their lives in general.

I've had a few weird touchpad problems in the past years..
The ones that act all jumpy or barely respond.. but then do sometimes work - usually an SPI/motherboard problem.
The ones that move by themselves or jump to random locations when not in use - usually the touchpad.

.. and the super sensitive like you describe. For the handful of times I saw it, it was the TP. Those older, cheap Toshiba models used to have a bunch of crap TP's.

 

[HCHTech]

I had an odd touchpad issue a few weeks ago, it was an ultrabook and it turned out the battery was swelling and pressing up against the bottom of the touchpad. We only found it because we were taking it apart to get the part number - ha.

 

[symbatech]

Recently I've been experiencing some odd touchpad behavior on several Dell laptop models. The touchpads were sluggish/unresponsive or jumpy. Turned out to be caused by non-OEM power adapters. They create some sort of ground loop that interferes with the touchpad operation. Replacing the adapter with a genuine Dell one cured the problem.

 

[HFultzjr]

If they go for it..........................
A cheap fix would be a wireless mouse.
Anybody that doesn't know how it worked before, probably would like a mouse............lol
Or, replace the touchpad.