How can I activate the touchpad without using FN Keys (Acer E5-575G)

MarkStr

My FN key is broken (tried everything, installing and uninstalling drivers, cleaning beneath the physical key etc).

Without it, I cannot activate my touchpad (FN + F7 combination).

Is there any way to activate it otherwise? There's no option in the Windows settings as far as I could find. Nothing in the ELAN touchpad menu either.

brummyfan2

Hi,
Could you please go to BIOS screen, move to Main tab and check whether the Touchpad is in Advanced mode, if not, switch to Advanced mode and see whether it helps.

MarkStr

brummyfan2 said:

Hi,
Could you please go to BIOS screen, move to Main tab and check whether the Touchpad is in Advanced mode, if not, switch to Advanced mode and see whether it helps.

 Hi there! 

First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer me.

You were right, this option was disabled in the bios. Problem is, after enabling it the on/off toggle button appears in the Windows settings - along with some other options - but the touchpad doesn't work even if it's toggled on.

My suspicion it doesn't override the FN + F7 command which was used to toggle the touchpad on/off. And as I said before, no FN keys combination is working anymore.

It's definitely not a touchpad issue, it would be to great of a coincidence, considering FN stopped working too. Maybe it stayed blocked in that way somehow? Tried to remap FN key to some other key using third party softwares, but as I understand - that key doesn't have any code on its own (which means you cannot really remap it), the message gets directly to the keyboard controller or something.

MarkStr

Is there no solution to this? 

Reinstalling Windows didn't do anything. Tried to remap FN key using AutoHotkey software but FN key doesn't generate any scancode.

But I guess FN + specific key combination should generate a scancode or something. How do I find it?

Without it, my touchpad is rendered non-functional. Would really hate to replace the whole keyboard and send it to service for a single broken key. Especially now when I'm very busy at work. Did ACER really made some laptop vital functions (such as touchpad toggle, screen toggle etc) dependable on a single physical key that cannot be even remapped on software level?

Hasn't anyone encountered this problem before?

EDIT: I'd LIKE to mention that everytime Windows starts, the overlay for touchpad off appears. Similar overlay to the caps lock key