Touchpad Help

17lbp

I'm pulling my hair out with this if anyone can help.
Got a Packard Bell easynot BU45 laptop and all was well until the touchpad stopped working, i installed a driver from synaptics site and all was fine again for a week or so until stopped working again. Again I installed driver and started working again - anyway cut a long story short it kept doing this more and more regularly, then the synaptics driver would no longer work. I went onto Packard Bell site and although my model of laptop wasn't listed I downloaded another driver which appeared to work for a short while but again stopped working.
The long and short of it is now I cannot get the touchpad to work at all. I've uninstalled and reinstalled various drivers, checked bios to see if its enabled, I don't appear to have one of the buttons that turns touchpad on/off ie Fn+??? I even created a partition on the drive and loaded windows but didn't help.
Does this suggest that perhaps the touchpad is broken? In the device manager the only thing listed under mice/pointing device is the usb mouse that I'm using.
Any help greatly appreciated.

fwor

It does sound like it may be a hardware problem.

The one near-certain way to distinguish between hardware and software/driver problems is to download one of the Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 11.04. This has a Synaptics driver built into the kernel, so it doesn't need anything extra to be installed. If you boot the laptop from the Linux LiveCD and the touchpad works Ok, it's not a hardware problem, and you need to find a more appropriate driver.

Don't worry, the LiveCD won't change your existing hard disk installation (provided you don't tell it to install itself, of course!).

17lbp

fwor wrote: »

It does sound like it may be a hardware problem.

The one near-certain way to distinguish between hardware and software/driver problems is to download one of the Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 11.04. This has a Synaptics driver built into the kernel, so it doesn't need anything extra to be installed. If you boot the laptop from the Linux LiveCD and the touchpad works Ok, it's not a hardware problem, and you need to find a more appropriate driver.

Don't worry, the LiveCD won't change your existing hard disk installation (provided you don't tell it to install itself, of course!).

Many thanks, am downloading ubuntu just now and will give it a try - at least that way I can find out.
Thanks again