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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.

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  • v1607 is no longer supported... please update to the most recent version of Windows (v1909), then determine if the issue still exists (it's pointless to attempt to troubleshoot this on a no longer supported version of Windows)
    – JW0914
    Jan 10, 2020 at 16:31
  • @JW0914 It is an LTSB version, meaning it is supported for 10 years after release. Mainstream support ends next year and extended support ends in 2026, as can be read in the lifecycle fact sheet.
    – Bart
    Jan 10, 2020 at 16:45
  • @JW0914 Edited title to clarify.
    – Bart
    Jan 10, 2020 at 16:55
  • I didn't realize there was a second section under the first Enterprise section (which stated 18 months from first release - thanks for letting me know =]). I'm not sure where to begin troubleshooting your issue, but it is likely an issue with v1607, as due to laptop hardware being builtin, the touchpad is designed to be used with the basic generic drivers included in Windows (OEM drivers are only required if wanting the additional features, i.e. scrolling, touch zones, etc.). Does Belarc Advisor's report detect the touchpad?
    – JW0914
    Jan 11, 2020 at 12:35
  • @JW0914 Well I didn't know about Berlac, that's what this site is for :) Unfortunately Berlac only detects the external USB mouse, same as the Windows hardware manager.
    – Bart
    Jan 13, 2020 at 8:49

1 Answer 1

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In 2017, Microsoft decided LTSB (now LTSC) would only support chipsets available at the time of release. Apparently this was retro-actively applied to the 2016 version. The A315-54-5580 runs on an 8th generation i5, while official support stops at the 7th gen.

I am now also having trouble replacing the Basic Display-adapter with a hardware-specific driver. (Tried Windows Home repository, drivers from Acer website, drivers from Intel.)

While others appear to have gotten lucky installing 1607 LTSB on 8th gen, I am guessing this artificial limitation is what is causing these issues. Suppressing a strong to urge to rant about this :)

EDIT - for others running into this issue, these are the symptoms I have noticed:

  • Touchpad not detected
  • No sleep mode available
  • Unable to install specific graphics driver
  • (Related to driver?) Brightness fn-buttons not working (other fn-buttons are working)
  • (Related to driver?) Unable to detect external monitor.

EDIT2 - Confirmed. I installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 on the laptop and (after Windows automatically downloaded some drivers) none of these issues occurred. No problematic or unknown devices.

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