Use Synaptics Touchpad Scroll in VMware Guest

Question

I would like to use Synaptics "Two-Finger Scrolling" inside a VMware guest.

It works as expected on the host but VMware does not seem to support it. The mouse cursor changes to indicate that scrolling is active but the VMware guest will not respond to it.

• VMware Workstation 7.1
• Host and Guest OS: Windows 7 (64bit)
• Synaptics Driver 15.0.9.0
• Device is shown as "Synaptics LuxPad V7.4"

Is it possible to make this work somehow? (e.g. modify .vmx, change Synaptics options or with a driver that emulates "mouse wheel scrolling")

Update: I have already tried several options in the Synaptics driver but the only change was that it displayed a different mouse cursor when trying to scroll.

Answer 1

Many people have complained regarding this problem, and feature requests have been submitted to Synaptics.

I have found one success report here. Although it is for Ubuntu, it seems to show that there is a solution to this problem.

I suggest that you try out the solutions outlined in the article below, for both host and guest:
Fixing Firefox Scrolling Problems with Dell Synaptics Touchpad

The article mentions two fixes:

1. Remove Circular Scrolling option from the mouse properties
2. Replace the Dell touchpad drivers by the Synaptics drivers

As the article says for the second one:

you can remove the Dell touchpad drivers and install the generic Synaptics ones, which work better for a lot of people — but they are missing some of the extra Dell features. As long as your touchpad does what you are expecting, it could be worth it.

I suggest to create a system restore point before changing the drivers, just in case.
You can also always rollback the driver from the Device Manager.

EDIT1

Some people report success when using the ALPS driver rather than Synaptics.
As says Alps Touchpad Driver for Windows 7 :

some Dell laptops do not have touchpads made by Synaptics. They have Alps touchpads. If you are not sure about what kind of touchpad you have, please see this post about identifying the correct model.

When I helped my user to upgrade his Inspiron 1420 to Windows 7, I used the driver for Vista. Here is the link to the download. This driver is for 32bit only. If this does not work for you, you can also try the driver for Windows 7. Here is the link. The second link provides both 32bit and 64bit drivers.

EDIT2

The following thread has some interesting info:
Problems with Synaptics touchpad not able to scroll in Guest OS (Windows XP)

The last entry in the thread says:

I have several colleagues who would like to use Vmware on laptops for support purposes. A few are trying Sun's Virtualbox, and others are trying Vmware. Scrolling works fine with Virtualbox, but SUN's committment to this type of product has burned folks in the past.

It seems like VMware simply doesn't care much about Synaptics, and your device is not well supported by it. Although this doesn't directly answer your question, I think that you will need to move to Virtualbox in order to get the touchpad working.

To sweeten the pill, see How to Convert a VMware to Virtualbox.

Answer 2

As there is currently no solution the only thing to do is to fill out a feature request at

http://www.vmware.com/contact/contactus.html?department=prod_request

Just paste the first two paragrahps from the question into the text field.