Dell 7720 Inspiron - Alternate Alps Touchpad Driver

Question

Good day fellow Inspiron 7720 User,

I've been playing around with my Inspiron 17R 7720 SE for a couple of weeks now and have had some ups and downs.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it though.

One issue I've had to deal with is that the Touchpad is a Alps (and not Synaptics as I had hoped).
On top of it, Dell's driver for Windows 8 (and probably 7) is heavily skinned and customized.
One of the missing features in my case was a simple "2 Finger Tap" that would trigger a Right Click (been using that on all my laptops for years)

Anyways, after much research, I managed to find a slightly more recent Alps driver which is thankfully more Generic compared to Dell's customized version.

It solves pretty much all of my problems and brings some additional settings including 2 Finger Tap.

If you'd like to give it a try, you can download it here: TouchPad_ALPS_8.100.2020.112_W8x64U_A.zip

You will need to uninstall Dell's Touchpad drivers first. Should you not do so, this one will complain about being older than the one already installed (which isnt the case, check the release date), and will screw up things a bit (new drivers will be in but old Dell UI will still show and context menu on the notifier icon will start missbehaving and not showing menu items due to registry key conflicts).

On a side note, there seem to be a lot of things to tinker with under HKLM/SOFTWARE/Alps ... I'll return with more info on this thread should I find anything interesting.

Dell : To be perfectly honnest, I really dont understand why you would make such a complicated custom UI for a set of drivers that works fine off of the manufacturer's shelf. Furthermore, your version doesnt integrate well with Windows 7/8 s mouse control panel.

I would understand putting a Dell logo here and there, but the Drivers+UI shipped with this machine are incomplete and confusing frankly clunky.

Hoping this will help.

MadBeggar

eavesdropper · Answer

Just bought the Inspiron 7720 and really want the 2 finger tap for right click. I read your post and did as instructed (uninstalled the old driver and installed the one on the link).

After the installation, I still cannot figre how to make it right click using the two finger tap. Where/how do I access these settings? When I click on control panel > hardware and sound > dell touchpad there is no choice for 2 finger tap.

Thank you in advance for your help.

staggerwing17 · Answer

THANK YOU! The Dell app is crap and the driver above is perfect. You are a lifesaver and I thank you for posting to help others out.

MadBeggar · Answer

Thanks Staggerwing17. Hoping it will help others too.

MadBeggar · Answer

Dell Support, would you be so kind as to add these drivers or the latest generic alps drivers to the Inspiron 17R support download page ?

MadBeggar · Answer

Hi Eavesdropper,

You should be able to go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound and choose "Mouse" under the "Devinces and Printers" section.

This should bring up Windows's mouse control panel.

Then, under Multitouch Gestures, simply set "Enable 2-Finger Tap" and set it to "Shortcut Menu"

Let me know if it works out for you :-)

Mad Beggard.

eavesdropper · Answer

Thanks MadBeggar for replying so promptly but it is still not working for me.

Under my Mouse Properties I do not have the option of multi-touch gestures. The tabs on the top are: Dell touchpad (and if I click on that tab the screen has a picture of a touchpad and it says Click to change Dell touchpad settings but nothing happens when I click); Buttons, Pointers, Pointer Options and Hardware.

Am I looking in the wrong place?

MadBeggar · Answer

Hi Eavesdropper,

Sounds to me like you might still have some Dell drivers installed in there.

Try uninstalling and reinstalling again.

Start by going to the control panel -> programs -> uninstall a program

Uninstall any Alps or Touchpad drivers you see there.

Then, before reinstalling, open your registry editor (regedit) and delete the HKLM/SOFTWARE/Alps folder.

Then install the Alps driver from my above post.

It should sort it out.

staggerwing17 · Answer

Hello MadBeggar! I have another question. The driver you recommended above worked perfectly in Windows 8. Is there an equivalent for Win 7? I have decided to stick with Win 7 and did a clean install on a SanDisk 240gb SSD. After removing the Dell Touchpad application and uninstalling the driver from Device Manager/Mouse/Properties, I installed the above driver and at first it looked perfect. Alas, no right click option (for Shortcut Menu)! This is definitely the ALPS interface (not the ridiculous Dell Touchpad interface) but I suspect that the Win8 driver is not appropriate for Win 7.

Any suggestions here? Again, thanks for your kind help MadBeggar!

MadBeggar · Answer

Hi StaggerWing17,

Good question... I've been too lazy to downgrade the machine yet (not that I like Windows 8 any more than we all do) and I'm also picking a fight with Dell in regards to the broken BIOS and its missing settings on the 7720 so I'm keeping the out of the box installation until we get that also sorted out.

Back to your question, I am not entirely sure but I've got a couple of ideas you could try :

The first one is to obiously try a couple of other driver versions.

I've put a couple of them up for you :

ALPS Touchpad 8.101.404.119 seems to be the latest version out there (Windows 8 compatible and probably 7 too)

ALPS Touchpad 8.100.300.108 is the first release 8.x branch of drivers (found on the Toshiba support site) and supports both 7 and 8

ALPS Touchpad 7.109.411.103/7.9.411.103 is the latest version I could find of the 7.x branch from 02/2012 for Windows 7

With a little hope, one of those might give you what you need.

If that doesnt work out, we can try playing around with the registry settings. For that, I'll give you a dump of my ALPS registry folder so we can compare the settings with the ones you have. It might as simple as setting the correct key/value pair and rebooting.

Keep me posted.

MadBeggar.

spastickyle1 · Answer

Any news on the outcome to this? I looked at the registry and it looks like there may be a possibility. Like StaggerWing17, I too am looking for two-finger tap for right-click on Windows 7. The three drivers above either didn't work, or were no different than Dell's official driver.

Madbeggar, I would be interested in your registry file.

Thanks!

Kyle

beaufrazer · Answer

Hey MadBegger, Are you able to provide details on the registry key that is linked to the 2 finger tap functionality?

vaibhav246 · Answer

You can try this one, i  worked for me http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&lc=en&softwareitem=ob-124001-1  its version 8.201.1711.124, although its compatibility is listed as windows 8 it worked fine in my Win 7 with double finger tap enabled by default.

vaibhav246 · Answer

You can try this one, it worked for me http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&lc=en&softwareitem=ob-124001-1  its version 8.201.1711.124, although its compatibility is listed as windows 8 it worked fine in my Win 7 with double finger tap enabled by default.

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Dell 7720 Inspiron - Alternate Alps Touchpad Driver

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