E5-571-563B Touchpad Randomly Sticking

SamaelQliphoth · September 2016

For reference, my laptop is running the pre-installed Windows 8.1 OS.

I got the laptop about a month ago, and it's had this problem seemingly at least once every few days or once a week, and has been going on since I took it out of the box. The tap-to-click seems to end up sticking making it as if I am holding it down to highlight or click & drag until eventually the cursor freezes, and nothing except restarting my laptop will stop it from doing that.
I don't have the "Device Settings" tab in "Mouse Properties" in Control Panel (there is no "Touchpad properties") where I would think I could change something like palm sensitivity or edge scroll or something. "Mouse Properties" shows that it's using Microsoft drivers for it from 2006, and in Device Manager, the only device under "Mouse and Pointing Devices" is "HID-compliant Mouse", which seems to be the same thing from Control Panel.

I was told to install the Synaptics Touchpad Driver, but it did nothing. I found it under Human Interface Devices as "Synaptics HID Device", but it neither upgraded the driver, nor did it show anything for a touchpad in the "Mouse and Pointing Devices", though it did show that it went through the process in the events tab of the Synaptics, it just isn't using the new driver.

I went back to Acer Support and they said that I'd have to either do a Factory Reset (which is an issue because I don't know what happened to cause this in the first place), or to send it in for repair which could take 2-3 weeks (which is also an issue because i have no other computers and I use this one a lot).

Has anyone managed to fix this? Does sending it for repair actually work? And if not, what laptop should I replace it with (with similar specs that Runs Windows 8.1, preferably.)? I've been trying to solve this for 2 weeks, googling everything I can think of tweaking Mouse Settings in Control Panel and the Metro UI, reading every post I can find, and went through Acer Support to seemingly no avail.