My touchpad occasionally partially stops working, in a weird way

glennmagusharvey

Every so often, without warning (i.e. I don't know what causes it), my touchpad will stop working.  Partially.  The pad will stop responding to inputs--like, I'll move my fingers around it and the cursor won't budge.  I can move them around the edges to use the edge scroll functions and it won't do a thing either.  But the mouse buttons will continue to work, so I know it's not a connection issue.  After a short while (usually a couple minutes), it'll respond to inputs again.

Unfortunately, I don't know what triggers it, or its undoing.  My main guess is that there's something hanging that causes it to stop working temporarily.  Or maybe the edge-scrolling feature is causing it problems.

Crimson

Did you try updating the touchpad's driver?

glennmagusharvey

Last time I checked, it was already updated to the newest version.  I guess I can check again.

Okay, I didn't directly check.  I don't actually know how to check my touchpad driver's version.  But the touchpad driver on my computer manufacturer's site says that the driver was released back in September 2010; I got this computer in January 2011.

Central Avenue

To be fair, that doesn't really mean anything. It's possible (if unlikely) that it had an outdated driver when you bought it.

You can check the installed driver's version in the Device Manager.