Dell Touchpad stops working randomly

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bigbluecrayon

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Sep 18, 2013
2
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10,510
Two months ago I bought a Dell Latitude e5530 running Windows 7 64-bit. About a month ago the Alps multi touchpad stopped working out of nowhere. The buttons were the first thing to stop responding, followed shortly (minutes) later by the touchpad itself. After trying many fixes including uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, updating the driver, uninstalling the driver and letting it reinstall automatically on restart, doing a system restore, I finally had to reinstall the OS, after which it worked. Since then, it has stopped again about 5 or 6 times, completely at random, out of nowhere (i.e., not on a restart - just when I'm web browsing, etc). Each time I have eventually gotten it working again after trying a bunch of different things, and so far there isn't a reliable pattern to what makes it stop and start again. Sometimes it starts after I do a system restore, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it stops right after a Windows update, sometimes not. So I don't think it's a hardware problem, but beyond that I have NO idea what the problem and/or solution is. Halp???
 
Solution
Have you tried contacting Dell technical support? I'm not trying to avoid helping, I would just hate to offer any suggestions that may cause you to void the warranty. Look at the Dell message boards and see if others are experiencing the same problem.
Have you tried contacting Dell technical support? I'm not trying to avoid helping, I would just hate to offer any suggestions that may cause you to void the warranty. Look at the Dell message boards and see if others are experiencing the same problem.
 
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bigbluecrayon

Honorable
Sep 18, 2013
2
0
10,510


Hi Ken, Thanks for replying. I did contact Dell technical support, and pretty much their only suggestion was to reinstall the driver again, which I did. Then they said either reinstall the OS (which did work, but since that didn't seem to resolve the issue with any finality I'm hesitant to bother doing it again), and if that didn't work, mail my laptop to the depot so they could fix it. I feel like I should be able to fix it without sending it in, since again, it doesn't seem like a hardware issue. And of course, every time I've been like okay, I'll send it in now, it magically starts working again, and I think just maybe this time it's solved for good. Which it never is, as it always stops working again within a few days or even hours.

I've also searched all kinds of forums and while I have found people who have had similar touchpad issues, almost all of those seemed to be resolved by either reinstalling, updating, or uninstalling the driver, all of which I've tried.

I also forgot to mention in my original post that another inconsistency is the touchpad device showing up in the Hardware and Sound menu in the Control Panel. Sometimes it doesn't show up at all, and when it does, it usually just gives options for a mouse and doesn't have any touchpad or pointing stick options (even during the intervals when the touchpad magically works again). In device manager, the input device often shows up as a mouse, even though I have no usb mouse connected and never have. When the touchpad does show up it says the device is working properly (argh!).
 

Terry_22

Estimable
Feb 7, 2016
1
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4,510
Hi BigBlueCrayon, I have two Dell laptops: XPS M1530 and Inspiron 1525 that I upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7. The touchpad worked without problems on the Inspiron but the XPS had same problem as you described. I did all the same procedures you tried with the same out comes. I then desided start from scratch and reinstall the original operating system (Vista in my case) so I could install the ALPS driver it came with, upgrade it to Windows 7, upgrade to Windows 10. Now the touchpad works but only if I do a restart after a cold boot. It will work with the ALPS driver for the Vista os only after I do a restart after I do a startup. If it goes into sleep mode I have to restart to get touchpad working again so I set it to never sleep in settings. It is a workaround but it work!
 
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