Windows 7 - Is there a Synaptics alternative?

Continued from this thread: Mobile Mouse 3500 left click seems to malfunction


Now, all my mouse troubles seem to stem from Synaptics most recent driver so I am not using it any longer. However, because I am not using it I am not able to take full advantage of my notebooks touch-pad. Having the Synaptics driver causes more trouble than it's worth.

Can you recommend any Synaptics alternatives?

FYI, the Synaptics driver seemed to make the left click unction of my mouse to "stick" which was very annoying. Maybe I can turn something off within the Synaptics settings?

My take would be that this is not a Synaptics problem since it works fine on 99.9% of all systems. There must be a conflict with another process on your system. Finding that though may be tedious. See whether you have anything unusual installed that other people would not have.

hmm, thank you for the opinion.

not sure if this helps, but, the problem only began after installing Synaptics.

p.s. can you maybe narrow it down in terms of possible conflicts? Pretty much everything on my system is standard stuff. Checked the driver in Device Manager and it does not list any conflicts, thought that was worth a shot to check.

For the life of me I can not think of what could be causing the conflict, but I installed Synaptics again just now and almost immediately the problem started.

My mouse is Logitech and I do not use any drivers from them, I just let Windows figure that out. Think that could be the problem? FYI, don't use Logitech software with their mouse because I don't have any use for the extra features it offers.

That is a tough call without having the system in front of me. I don't think the mouse is the culprit. Have a look ino the Event Viewer (Start > Right click on Computer > Manage). Maybe you get a clue from there.

Else you can do the usual routine like temporarily disabling the startup programs and see whether the culprit would be there (very often it is the AV program that makes trouble) - or check in Resource Monitor > CPU tab which processes are running when the problem occurs.

I had a really hard time finding a working Synaptics driver for my old Acer Aspire 5920. The latest one Acer offered wouldn't install, it just error-ed out. The latest from Synaptics seemed to work but the center scroll button didn't work correctly and I ended up un-installing it. The original recommended Acer driver was version 14 something. I tried an earlier version for an older similar model laptop from the Acer site (Synaptics v13.2.2.0 Windows 7 X86 X64) and it worked perfectly. I didn't have your problem, but without the driver my middle touch pad scroll button didn't work and some extra media keys on the laptop didn't work. Now everything works like it did when that laptop originaly had Vista on it.

disabled "tapping", specifically the "tap again and hold to drag" option within Synaptic and it seems to have solved the problem so far.