Precision M6500 touchpad jumps left a few inches when moving finger right

I forwarded one of the recent postings of this forum to the people at Dell (who were involved in resolving my issues) this morning.  They were quite thankful for my info and said in their reply:

1)      “We will get this over to our Community Outreach Team so they can get engaged in the forums regarding this issue and get these customers taken care of”

2)      “We will get the depot engaged to make sure they are using the new stock of parts”

So there are people at Dell who are well aware of the issue and will work toward resolving this.

I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but I just had my palmrest/touchpad and keyboard replaced 10 days ago and still have the problem. This was the first replacement of the keyboard and the third replacement of the palmrest/touchpad.

I have examined the replacement parts along the way and have detected no change whatsoever in the design of the palmrest (my machine is now on its fourth). The replacement keyboard was of a different design but unfortunately it did not solve the problem.

I have discovered that I can influence the problem by applying pressure to different areas of the plastic strip of the palmrest that is above the top of the touchpad and below the upper set of mouse buttons. I discovered this before I realized that directly beneath this plastic strip is where the keyboard plugs into the touchpad. When the problem presents itself and the left third of the touchpad becomes unresponsive, I can cause it to become responsive again by applying light pressure to the plastic strip at the point where the dead/live transition line exists. This solution works as long as I'm willing to work one-handed, which isn't for very long. Applying pressure, even very light pressure, along different parts of this strip will cause the touchpad to behave differently.

It certainly seems that there is a hardware and/or engineering problem here, but it is also curious that a reboot will always cause the touchpad to initially work properly until it fails again. I wish I could believe that the problem has been addressed with new hardware, but my experience does not bear that out.

I'm ready to request a complete replacement machine but don't see much point until I know that the new ones don't have the same problem.

Several months since my keyboard, palmrest & touchpad were replaced and the problem is well and truely gone.

It's not a subtle change...my machine was unusable via touchpad, and now it's fine.

Sorry to hear that some guys are getting bad parts replaced with bad parts...but keep trying or push for a whole machine swap.

Good parts are out there somewhere!

I had my palm rest assembly (includes touch pad) replaced and the problem has gone away for almost two weeks now. I just have to figure out how to take the keyboard off and move whatever is causing the raised portion around the sdf area of the keyboard. After it was replaced I installed the just out touch pad driver and it kept stopping cursor movements, buttons and pointer still worked just not touch pad movement, so I put the old driver back in and have not had a problem since.

Hi,

I have the same probelm here with a M6500.

(I hope, you can understand my "german english")

Yesterday i got the solution. DELL needed 4 tries to fix this!
The last try was to replace the complete notebook with a new one. ;)
1st try: replace palmrest
2nd try: replace mainboard
3rd try: replace keyboard and palmrest again

my configuration:
i5-520, 4 GB RAM, BIOS A04, Win7 Pro 64 german.

I can reproduce the problem with the touchpad by pressing one of the three keys under the pad. Mostly i need only one time key press to switch the pad to the "fault mode". Some times I need 2 or 3. When I never press one of this keys, it's all right with the pad.

I can switch back from "fault" to "normal mode", when I put the system in power save mode with Fn-F1 and wake up. Or, of course, with reboot.

In my case the OS and driver are not relevant. In the BIOS setup (F2 at boot time) I have the same behavior. I must only press one of these keys and the trouble with the pad goes on. And there is no OS oder driver running.

With Win7 you can track what the pad thinks where the finger is touched. The tool ist the Synyptics-MoodPad. This is allready installed and executable from here (with DELL-Drivers too):
C:\Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP\SynMood.exe

I see with this tool, when I touch left, the pad thinks my finger is half right. Well, checked this out...

bye,
Thomas

Purchased a M6500 about one month ago.... wow... this is the first precision that has not preformed for us... we are a design firm and the touch pads are very important for 3D BIM autocad work..... we had the same issues... after replacing motherboard and the ATI graphics card... with no avail.... Dell sent me a new machine... few things I notice... 

1. Then new machine had a much smaller powere pack... like half the size...!!!! thats great given the first one was like a boat anchor.

2. New power supply lights up at the point of the machine instead of at the power pac so you can clearly tell if power is at the machine.

3. Much faster

4. NVIDIA graphics card instead of ATI ... Talked to my I.T. Guy... he said much better!

5. Still having the same issues with the mouse....  intermittently it gets drunk....... only fix.... reboot..... DELL PLEASE GET THIS FIXED ASAP!

After calling Dell Support, I was assisted with some additional troubleshooting.  I took out the hard drive and booted to the BIOS to see if I could duplicate the touchpad behavior w/o the OS.  

I was not able to.  The touchpad functioned well in the BIOS (presumably without the benefit of any downloaded drivers).  So the problem only seems to occur when there is an OS and/or software involved.  This led the Dell Support tech that perhaps my image was corrupt.

So I asked for a new image.  

The only problem here is that laptop configuration has 4 x 4GB RAM chips and the image recovery CD/DVDs require <= 2GB RAM.  So I was shipped the OEM Win 7 install media and the Drivers DVDs.

I received them yesterday and installed right away.  However, here I am to report the same problem with the touchpad.

Tech support is now scheduling a touchpad replacement.  I will keep all posted.

So the Dell technician came today and replaced a few boards, the palm rest, touchpad and buttons.  So far so good!  I will keep you posted.

So on-site service is also off the 'fix list' then. :emotion-6: Is this thread a practical joke? This is Dell's top-O-the-line machine. It has been almost a week now and they won't even write back to me after my support contact about this, and then there are all these other people on their own forum with exactly the same problem and nobody even chimes in to say "Sit tight guys, we're working on it."? I feel like after spending 5G's on this thing I would at least see a $6 Dell mouse in the mail to keep me going until they got to the bottom of it. I'm very quickly losing my once unshakable faith in the great Dell Corporation.

That was an old post.  Swapping the keyboard, palmrest and touchpad on my machine has solved it for a few months now.

Nothing to do with drivers, bios, touchpad options settings, Control Point, etc made any difference at all and I tried everything.

Call Dell and reference this forum thread for your problem.

They have documented the problem against this thread.

Good luck!

It's not easy having one of the most spendy machines on the market and not being able to get it working.

[quote user="dbongard"] So on-site service is also off the 'fix list' then. :emotion-6: Is this thread a practical joke? This is Dell's top-O-the-line machine. It has been almost a week now and they won't even write back to me after my support contact about this, and then there are all these other people on their own forum with exactly the same problem and nobody even chimes in to say "Sit tight guys, we're working on it."? I feel like after spending 5G's on this thing I would at least see a $6 Dell mouse in the mail to keep me going until they got to the bottom of it. I'm very quickly losing my once unshakable faith in the great Dell Corporation.

Could you explain it more clearly? I'm new here.

[/quote]

This thread has been very useful to me.  By pointing Dell to this thread I was able to accelerate the resolution of my M6500 problems.   I had several M6500's with the touchpad issue.   All are repaired and working fine.   Because of the problems we had, we were able to negoitiate an extension to our Dell warranty for a few months.   

The only solution (IMHO) is to get Dell to replace your touchpad and/or keyboard hardware with good parts.    I'd like to think by now they've got all the bad parts "out of the system", but sounds like that may not be the case yet.

Contacted Dell chat over the weekend... got a low level support person that wanted me to reinstall my whole system... I had to cut her off.... she was totally lost.... useless...... Dell you need to get this fixed... we precision users have a lot of contacts!

we precision users have a lot of contacts!

No kidding, eh!  The top of the line machine in their range that you could get four Dell Inspirons for the price of are only going to be piloted by affluent professionals that Dell stands to make ALLOT of money from over the next few decades, and they respond to their formalized support claims as though you were having trouble changing your background screen to a pretty colour.

To be honest I think that if Dell was taking their high end customers seriously then they should have done a mail-out to ALL of their 6500 owners to say "We have identified a problem that may effect you so if you are having trouble with this particular issue then please contact us to help you with it."  You have to wonder how many poor buggers are out there re-installing Windows and changing settings or just re-booting all of the time because they have not found this support thread yet.  If their own tech people don't know about it then how are their customers supposed to?  Isn't this how Microsoft lost the worlds biggest monopoly to Apple?

Mine is still trouble free after palm rest / Touchpad replacement. I believe the idea that there was a bad run of parts that even included some of the replacement items makes sense. I'm glad I held off until I saw some actual results here instead of spending days rebuilding my setup when I knew it wasn't the problem.