Touchpad on/off button doesn't work

Question

A friend of mine recently upgraded her laptop to windows 7, but then she found that the "on/off" button of the touchpad doesn't work anymore. Therefor, she asked me for help. As I don't know the model of her laptop, I downloaded the driver on sysnaptics' web site, which is supposed to work for any kind of touchpad.

However, although we can turn of the laptop by software method after installation of the driver, the "on/off" button still doesn't work.

I feel that it's a bit strange. Is the button not part of the touchpad so Synaptics' driver doesn't need to support it???

Answer 1

I can only speak for HP laptops (as the only brand I have experience with that has on/off buttons).

This is a motherboard feature that disables the touchpad, whilst the mouse driver knows the current state, it does not actually handle the on/off state - this is done in a separate vendor specific driver (that usually comes bundled with the touchpad driver).

You can try downloading the Synaptics package from the laptop vendors webpage and have a look there to see if there are any other support packages.