Aspire V3-772G touchpad behaving erratically

Hi,

I have an Aspire V3-772G (NX.MMCED.054, i7-4702MQ/12GB/GTX850M/256GB/1TB) laptop that I got around a week ago. It's got a Synaptics touchpad with the Windows 8.1 driver version 17.0.6.17.

Yesterday as I turned on the laptop, the touchpad behaved erratically:

- the cursor moved to the left by itself and jittered, UNLESS I placed my finger on the touchpad and held it still

- it kept registering left clicks by itself even if my fingers were nowhere near the touchpad

- I could not click the left button (tapping kind of worked though)

- if I clicked the left button, a right click would happen

So I disabled all the swipe/tap/click/etc features in the Synaptics settings. No effect.

Then I uninstalled the Synaptics driver that came with the laptop, rebooted, and tried the default PS/2-compatible mouse driver in Windows. The jittering got even worse.

Then I installed the older (Windows 8) version of the driver (16.3.4.5) from the Acer support site, and rebooted. No effect. Disabling the touchpad features didn't help either.

Then I uninstalled the driver, rebooted, and reinstalled the newer ones. No effect, still erratic.

At this point I went to bed, furious at my new laptop.

As I woke up this morning, the touchpad seems to be working ok again!

My question is: has anyone got any idea why it threw a hissy fit? Is this common? Or is the touchpad defective?

Best regards,

Reed

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jcraig0628

I have the same problem with my Aspire R7 going on about a week now. I did all the same things you did but I'm still having the problem. I actually have the touchpad disabled right now and I'm still having the issues with the pointer jumping around erratically, random clicks, etc. Same problem whether I attach an external USB mouse or try to use the touchscreen. There have been a few times that the problem seemed to resolve itself for a while but then came back, so probably a good chance that the issues will return for you as well. So far nobody on this community has offerered a viable solution to the problem, but I'm hoping someone will soon.

Cheers,

Jeff

reed

Good news - I survived a full two weeks without having the touchpad go mental.

Now, it's relapsed again, and the symptoms are:

- tapping doesn't work at all

- clicking anywhere on the pad (left or right) results in a right click

- two finger scroll doesn't work at all

- the cursor isn't jittery, but the cursor doesn't always move - every 2nd or 3rd time I move my finger the cursor decides to move

- I can sort of left click by clicking while resting three fingers elsewhere on the touchpad Smiley Happy

All in all, this is completely ridiculous.

keith111

1) Control Panel ---> Device Manager ---> Mice and other Pointing Devices -AND- Human Interface Devices ---> Note any conflicting devices (marked by an exclamation symbol).

2) Control Panel ---> Troubleshooting ---> Hardware and Sound ---> Device/Hardware and Devices: Run troubleshooter and View Detailed Information. Follow suggestions and note resolved issues. Recheck step 1) for devices working properly (no exclamation mark symbol detected) .

Issue not resolved :

3) Control Panel ---> Recovery ---> Open System Restore: Rollback to date wished or before problem issue arose. If restore date won't complete (because of running background items), repeat restore in Safe Mode (restart, F5, F8).

reed

The plot thickens:

The touchpad started acting crazy again after a couple of weeks of behaving properly.

I then burned a Ubuntu install DVD and booted into Ubuntu, and what do you know, the touchpad acts crazy in Ubuntu as well.

So I'm suspecting it isn't a driver issue. Unless the touchpad drivers are equally crappy in Windows and in Ubuntu. Doubt it.

Anyway, then I (by chance) powered off the laptop, I mean, I did a proper shutdown instead of restart/sleep/hibernate, then booted into Windows, and hey presto, the touchpad works great again.

keith111, I appreciate the stock answer. Here are the replies to your questions.

1) There are no conflicting devices (and there never has been).

2) The troubleshooter says "Hardware changes might not have been detected." I've never seen it say anything else.

3) To me it would seem that there's no guarantee that a system restore would magically make the touchpad behave properly, especially because when it starts acting up it acts up in Linux as well, which to me is a sign of a bigger problem than Synaptics' infamous drivers.

jkim

I have been sufferring the same symptoms as you, and have been since I bought the laptop in June 2014.

Acer Support have been very unhelpful, telling me to reinstall drivers instead of replacing my touchpad hardware.

Symptoms are:

- Random jitter of mouse cursor when touchpad isn't even touched.

- Erratic clicks - When I did not touch the mouse, it would click into a random location.

- Only 1 button available. Whether this be left or right, only 1 button becomes available.

- Mouse cursor jump - especially when lifting finger off.

Workarounds currently employed... not that any of these consistently work:

- Reboot

- Fn+F7 (disable and enable touchpad)

- Shutdown. Wait for a while. Boot.

Tried all the drivers, roll back OS to factory, etc... Seems to be faulty hardware to me.

keenanlmorales

Getting this way too often. I restart my laptop maybe 6 times a day because of this? I have also run into an issue where a lot of the character keys ..... -=[]\;'/ ..... completely chang meaning and start posting a bunch of other random stuff. Which also causes me to restart my computer. This is my first acer experience and was definitely hoping for more hope there is a fix.