Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Windows 7 touchpad driver for most Dell laptops.

When you finish installing Windows 7 on most Dell laptops after you had XP or Vista before, what you'll observe related to the touchpad is that even if it is highly accurate, features like scrolling on the edge of the touchpad or forward-back gestures are not working at all. And this happens because Microsoft have included into their OS a quite basic driver, which assures only the normal functionality of the device, without any additional feature.

Many Dell laptops are using touchpads which are manufactured by Alps, on Dell's official site being available drivers designed for XP/Vista only. However, even if after installation Windows prompted me that this driver has known compatibility issues with 7, Windows wasn't able, as expected, to find a solution for this, so I ran the software like it was.

Surprisingly, it works without any major problem, it just moves pretty slow and it adds a little inaccuracy when using the touchpad, but I think it might be corrected using application's settings, but I didn't have time for that yet. However, features like scrolling or forward-back gestures on the edges on the touchpad work perfectly. You can install it and if you then prefer using your laptop without it, you can remove it.

Tested on my Dell D610 laptop with a fresh installed Windows 7 and works. It might work on most other Dell models, mainly with the condition of having similar Alps touchpad devices.

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