Www.synaptics.com Touchpad Driver

[Margit Szermer]

SynapticsTouchPad device drivers are customized and supported by notebook manufacturers to meet specific driver requirements for their individual products. To ensure the appropriate driver for your device, always use the driver your specific notebook OEM supports.

Synaptics has a rich heritage in capacitive touch sensing, dating back to 1995 and our launch of the first notebook PC TouchPad. Today touchpads are ubiquitous, and we continue to innovate and advance technologies that strive to perfect the user experience.

I have a Dell XPS 15 (9530) that has a Synaptics clickpad. I've tried tinkering with many settings and different Dell/Synaptics drivers, but there's always some aspects that don't work well (two finger scrolling, or palm rejection, etc).

After looking at the Synaptics website ( ) it mentions that "All Synaptics TouchPads can interface with Microsoft's Precision TouchPad driver or can be powered by the industry leading Synaptics Gesture Suite."

I found a way to do this and I have posted a quick tutorial here: The Verge Forums. This works on my HP Spectre X360 (2017) that has a synaptics touchpad. I cannot guarantee this will work for everyone, but it is worth a shot. My tutorial is based on the findings from here (reddit post).

So I noticed that with this hack, the driver would break after the system woke from a sleep state. By "break" I mean the touchpad would work, but none of the touchpad settings / precision functionality would be present. Interestingly enough, this issue did not happen when the machine would wake from hibernate, only when waking from sleep. To fix this, you need to create a windows task that restarts the driver on system wake.

To begin, first you need to grab a copy of devcon.exe for your particular operating system install. See this other superuser post for that. After you have devcon.exe on your machine (in my case, I put it under C:\Program Files\DevCon) you need to identify the driver you need restarted.

This command will bring up a list of different items. Look for the one with the description of "Synaptics HID-Compliant Touch pad Device" or something similar. For me, this maps to "ROOT\SYNHIDMINI\0000" which is the ID I am interested in for restarting purposes.

Once you have your ID, you need to create a scheduled task (as administrator!) to reset this device by ID. To do this, open Task Scheduler (you can search for this in the start menu) as an administrative user. Within the task scheduler window, create a new task:

Fill out the task's name (such as "Restart TouchPad On Wake") and description. Be sure to set it to run as a user with administrative privileges and to tick the "run with highest privileges" box. Also be sure to select the radio button for "Run whether user is logged in or not."

Next, click the triggers tab and create a new trigger. The trigger should begin the task on an event with the log being System and Source being Power-Troubleshooter. Event ID should be 1 (this stands for system wake).

Next, under the actions tab, create a new action. The action should be "start a program" and the Program/Script field should point to your full install path of devcon.exe. The arguments should be something like

Finally, be sure to open the conditions tab for the task and un-tick the box under the power heading that states "Start the task only if the computer is on AC power." This ensures the task still runs even when you are not plugged in.

Finally click ok and ensure that your task has been created. Now every time your system is woken up from sleep, this task will run devcon.exe and tell it to restart the synaptics driver as an administrative user. This should ensure that the driver is properly initialized for use and that you will have all of your Microsoft Precision goodness at all times.

My Acer S7-392 has a Synaptics clickpad as well and originally didn't support the Windows 10 multitouch gestures (no precision trackpad). As I still wanted to have those multitouch features I tried a couple of different drivers hoping they would work - one did!

For your model (XPS-15 9530), the Synaptics touchpad driver removes some gesture functions of the touchpad but may improve your touchpad experience overall (more info). Therefore you'll have to choose which touchpad drivers to use by toggling it on or off.

If you are Synaptic/Elan touchpad user, it can be successfully changed to the version of Elan driver which is compatible to precision touchpad and it's feature. Google "Elan WDF driver" and you will get it.

Notice that there are some critical steps you should follow to complete your installation. First, modify the file called "ETD.inf" with notepad and replace Hardware ID to your device's touchpad id (ACPI\ETDXXXX), then restart your computer with driver signature enforcement overrider disabled. after all installation finished and computer restarted, you will see the precision touchpad features at settings.

I see that in most help forums, the most common advice is to go to device manager and update the driver; In device manager, the Synaptic Touchpad is not listed. I have clicked "View > Show Hidden" to no avail. I have identified the generic "HID Compliant Mouse" driver the the TouchPad is using, but updating that has no change. I have also attempted to install older drivers from the internet, but none have worked. I was able to see all of the drivers provided for my machine on HPs website, and there is a Synaptic driver for the finger print sensor, but no other Synaptic drivers or drivers for the touchpad. Can someone help me locate the driver for the toushpad on this machine?

The touchpad "works" in that I can move the mouse around , but it acts like it always has the left-button pressed. So, when moving the pointer around an empty desktop, it is drawing a box as if I was selecting a group of items. Similarly, when I mouse over a window or menu, it selects the first thing it touches. This is almost like "ClickLock" is turned on permanently (it is not).

This package by Synaptics will provide support for Synaptics Pointing Devices on your netbook or laptop. Touchpad support with advanced features are activated after installing this driver, one of the features being the ability to adjust the sensitivity of your touchpad and the speed of the point it controls. Synaptics Pointing Device Driver control panel also allows you to configure the functionality of touch the 4 corners of your touchpad, such as one-touch application launching.The touchpad may also be used as a virtual mouse wheel or a scrollbar.

Most Laptop touchpads have a feature allowing you to drag your finger down the side or along the bottom of the pad to quickly control scrollbars. However, this feature may not work in Firefox or Thunderbird if they are not supported by the driver that shipped with the system.

You can solve this problem by obtaining the latest driver for your touchpad from your manufacturer. Synaptics provides a standard driver which works for many laptops, but it will not have the same features as the manufacturer's driver. You can check if your touchpad will support Synaptics' driver by looking for Synaptics TouchPad in the Windows Device Manager.

The back and forward functions don't work with Alps driver. There is a workaround by changing the title of the program to Netscape using the Titlebar Tweaks extension (or manually modifying the title). Another workaround involves editing the hex values in apoint.exe. Both methods are described here.

On Ubuntu 14.04 I just set vertical and horizontal hysteresis and high and low finger pressure to make touchpad feel smooth and nice. When I installed 18.04 I found that I can't adjust my touchpad any more (except a few options that are not too helpful in my case).

The synaptics config file can be copied to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and given a higher number than the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d synaptics.conf default. Then the synaptics touchpad driver overrides the libinput touchpad driver by having a higher priority.

I ran into problem after installing synaptics touchpad in ubuntu 18.04. My keyboard stopped working. So, I booted into the system (keyboard was working on login screen), mouse was working properly so I opened my mails from the history (I saved the commands in the mails using my mobile), I copied the following commands with enter (empty line after the commands):

Note: Save the commands with an empty line using enter at the end of commands. This will help commands to execute directly without pressing enter while copy pasting in terminal, if the keyboard is not working.

The problem is not necessarily the missing Synaptics drivers, it is more the fact that the libinput driver settings are purposefully left generic so that the user or hardware OEM can adjust them as desired.

Rather than simply uninstalling libinput and installing Synaptics, you can still add Synaptics but to keep everything working you need to provide an "override" by removing/updating references to libinput specifically in relation to your touchpad ONLY and adding in a rule for Synaptics.

A major part of the problem is that there doesn't appear to be any proper GUI tool and few of the hardware OEMs (Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc) provide customized configs optimized to their hardware outside the possible exception of their own preinstalled Ubuntu versions (Dell provides this option at least). I haven't grabbed the latest Dell Ubuntu image and unpacked it to see if they supply any customizations, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. If not I definitely think it is something they should see about adding, since the XPS13/XPS15 and their business brothers the Precision 55x0 models are amazingly fast running Ubuntu compared to Windows.

This article by Dell has a good start on how to potentially fix the issue (and doesn't necessarily only apply to their systems or their touchpads), -xps-ubuntu-general-touchpad-mouse-issue-fix?lang=en

I am using lubuntu Release 20.04.2 LTS (Focal Fossa) with 64-bit Kernel Linux 5.8.0-63-generic x86_64. My laptop is Dell inspiron i5 3567 I have been using it since a year and was working well, but today I opened my laptop and noticed while on terminal that my up arrow key has been continuously pressed I have never faced such implication, so in a hurry I powered it off and opened laptop's back lid and removed the keyboard and cleaned it (there was too much dirt) after fixing all the screws I booted it again and still the problem was not solved reinstalling the driver which was libinput by default using the command

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