Computer Tips and Tricks

Got a laptop in today that had such an odd problem. The customer said that they rushed the shutdown process and went ahead and hit the power button to shutdown the laptop. When they went back in and powered it on, the touchpad did not work.This was a Compaq (or HP) laptop model cq50-139wm (one of the deals at Walmart).

I installed the latest drivers over at synaptics.com but that did not work. I went to hp.com and got the latest drivers for that machine but that did not work. The device manager didn’t eben show the touch pad at all. The mouse setup under control panel did not even have a listing for the synaptics touch pad driver.

Thinking that it was malware related, I installed atf cleaner, pcfixer, malwarebytes, ccleaner and there was a lot of crap to remove but did not take care of the touchpad.

A lot of sites on this issue were saying to do fn-f7 or some key combination to make sure the touchpad was not turned off. In this case, there is a small push button above the touchpad, that is amber if it is turned off, blue or white if it is turned on. In my case, it was on, but the touchpad still did not work.

Did a system restore back several days but the touchpad still no worky.

I finally came across a site where it mentioned powering the laptop off, popping the battery out and letting it stay disconnected for more than a minute. This did the trick. Special thanks goes to http://forums.techguy.org for that info.

Technorati Tags: compaq cq50, laptop, synaptics, touchpad

Tags: compaq cq50, laptop, synaptics, touchpad