Our Acer Aspire A315-54-5580 laptop came with Windows 10 Home pre-installed. I wiped the hard drive (after backing up all partitions) and installed Windows 10 Enterprise N 2016 LTSB. This is an older version of Windows 10 (1607), receiving only monthly and no feature updates. All available updates have been installed.
Everything works fine except for the touchpad. It is simply not being detected in the hardware manager. Show hidden devices is enabled. There are no unknown/problematic or relevant disabled devices. I have looked over all devices and don't think one of them could be a wrongly installed touchpad. The add hardware wizard doesn't find any new devices in automatic mode.
When booting into Windows 10 PE, the touchpad works immediately. There it is assigned a standard driver, "HID-compliant mouse". AIDA offers no additional insight as to the exact model of the touchpad. The PE version of Windows is newer than ours (1809). Just like the pre-installed Windows Home. I'm guessing that is the cause of the problem. (Although I have installed the 2016 LTSB on many other laptops and have never run into this problem.)
From the backed up Windows Home partition, I have extracted all installed driver files. (Copied C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository) But without a device in device manager I have no use for these files.
Acer's website offers two touchpad driver downloads for this specific model, one by Synaptics and one by Elantech. (No idea why two - searched for drivers by serial number, upon which website displays correct laptop model and these two drivers among many others.) Ran setup.exe from both. Both report a successful install (which probably only means diver files have been copied) but both had no impact.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.