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18 Posts
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Dell Inspiron 1521 Touchpad's buttons suddenly stopped working
[Had accidentally posted this in the Audio section, closed there and moved here]
This is the darnest thing. Everything was working fine until yesterday until I decided to clean the laptop's keyboard using a plain paper tissue (which I wet slightly) instead of the regular alcohol-based computer wipes (which I think are made of some thicker material).
Although I cleaned the keyboard fine, the tissue paper tore and left pieces of it at many places around the keyboard keys. I removed all the torn pieces and as far as I can tell, none remain.
To make matters worse, I did the cleaning while the laptop was at Windows Vista's login screen. I know, I know, thats pretty stupid. Anyways, the keys were being pressed in all sorta different ways. Now, the touchpad's buttons are completely unresponsive and I have NO idea why THAT might have happened. The touchpad works fine and I'm able to click by tapping the touchpad, but of course, my functionality is severely limited...
The buttons *were* responsive earlier when I pressed them REALLY hard, and maybe 1 in 5 tries... but then I deleted the driver, thinking it might help, and now the buttons are COMPLETELY unresponsive (the touchpad works just fine).
I'm not so sure that the buttons are being blocked because of the tissue papers, because I didnt clean the touchpad, except cursorily.
siliconpi
18 Posts
0
November 9th, 2009 22:00
Hi, What am I supposed to do to get some support from Dell? I *cannot* email them / chat with them as the laptop is past its warranty period apparently and that leaves me completely stranded.
I was under the impression that some of the Dell support staff would be looking into these forums...
siliconpi
18 Posts
0
November 11th, 2009 10:00
Hi,
What do I need to do to get someone from Dell to look at this?
siliconpi
18 Posts
0
November 11th, 2009 22:00
Alrighty... strangeness... I cleaned it once again and it seems to be working now. VERY oddly, when the computer was having a CPU utilization of > 50%, the buttons stopped working again...
Closing the thread.
siliconpi
18 Posts
0
March 8th, 2010 02:00
Yeah... I was wrong... it didn't work and it hasn't been working for the last 3 months... I can't figure out why the touchpad BUTTONs dont work, but the pad itself is working fine...
I can't understand why no one from Dell has bothered replying yet!!
fadjaz
1 Message
0
June 17th, 2010 14:00
hey there, i had a similar kind of problem with my touch pad.... the touch pad itself was working properly but the buttons had suddenly just stopped working. What i did was that i deleted the touch pad drivers, it didnt exactly help or anything... the buttons were still unresponsive. So just out of frustration i pressed both of the touch pad buttons at the same time for about 1-2 seconds and released.... and well what do you know they were working again. Now i am not sure if this method will cure your problem but you might as well try it out, have a nice one!