Crazy Touchpad after Upgrade to 7 on HP Pavilion dv5140us

[lokstah]

Hi All; thanks in advance for your help.

I just performed a clean install of Windows 7 on my wife's HP Pavilion dv5140us. (For the record, I'd previously done this operation on an Acer Extensa with none of the issues mentioned below).

My Synaptics touchpad is causing me problems. The issues are twofold. (I know there are countless threads on similar issues, but I've been unable to find one which discusses my precise problem, so forgive me.)

1) If I don't install proper touchpad drivers (ie, I allow Windows to operate the touchpad using standard HID-compliant mouse drivers), the touchpad actually works perfectly. Movement is smooth; scrolling works; buttons function properly, etc.

2) If I install proper drivers for the touchpad, it's unusable. The pointer wildly skips, leaps, and jumps all over the place, no matter how I adjust the settings for sensitivity, speed, palm-protection, etc. It's a crazy mess.

So WHY, you ask, don't I just stick with the MS mouse drivers? Answer: I need to be able to disable the touchpad's "tapping" features. My wife can't stand tapping-enabled touchpads. Somehow, the MS mouse driver provides for tapping functionality... but no obvious way to disable it.

The solution I'm looking for, then, is either:
- A way to make a Synaptics driver work, thus giving me the ability to disable the tapping feature
- OR, a way to disable the tapping feature while using the standard mouse driver, which already does work

Any ideas?

WHAT I'VE TRIED
I've attempted to use every current and semi-current touchpad driver I could find. This includes:

• the current Synaptics driver provided by HP for the Pavilion dv5140us (available for Vista only; I've installed it both in compatibility mode and standard mode)
• the current Synaptics driver provided by HP for all laptops (available for Windows 7)
• the current Windows 7 Synaptics driver provided directly by Synaptics

Thanks so much, gurus.

 

[lokstah]

Anything, wise friends? Thanks again for you input.

 

[fishnbanjo]

I think the proper Synaptics drivers might work for you if you try this, assuming you have not already. Download the Windows 7 Synaptics drivers and place them in a folder, also download CCleaner and DriveSweeper and epand the last two. Reboot into SAFE Mode and remove the drivers and the touchpad in Device Manager run DriveSweeper and CCleaner, reboot and after the MS driver is uploaded in the new hardware wizard update the driver by pointing it to your folder. Let us know how this goes......

 

[iphone]

after installing the drivers, did you reboot your computer?

 

[lokstah]

Fishbanjo, I'll try that later today and report back. Thanks for the suggestion.

iPhone, thanks for the response. Though I'm not a professional, I do have a pretty solid foundation when it comes to software and hardware--I covered the basic bases. Definitely rebooted.

I'll post again later once I've had the chance to experiment some with CCleaner and Drivesweeper in safe mode.