XPS 15 TouchPad/ClickPad Intermittent Problems - Possible Workaround

Hi, excuse the long post but I wanted to document the things I'd tried to resolve this.

I have an XPS 15 7590 running Windows 10 and experienced the same intermittent touchpad issues reported elsewhere. However I now seem to have found what's triggering the problem and since I changed my configuration as below I haven't had the problem again.

The symptoms were that the touchpad would seemingly suddenly start working only intermittently. Specifically:

1. Touching and moving my finger over the surface of the touchpad doesn't move the mouse immediately - there's a lag of a second or two after which the mouse cursor moves for a short distance and then stops moving again. Very annoying obviously.

2. Tapping the surface, which is supposed to emit a single left mouse click, does nothing. I don't know about other tap combinations but just the basic left click tap certainly stops working The only way to get a click out of the touchpad at that point is to depress the physical left mouse button (which is actually anywhere on the touchpad, as well as at the bottom left of it). That at least does work, but the touch-sensitive tap failing to work is an annoyance.

I found that after rebooting, the problem went away. However later on the same day it would just come back and initially I couldn't find a reason.

I reported the problem to Dell and sent them a video of the erratic behaviour and they then changed the whole palm rest assembly under warranty. It made no difference. The new touchpad had the same problem.

The touchpad itself is a Synaptics ClickPad (https://www.synaptics.com/products/touchpad-family/clickpad) and I assume all the problems people are having are with the Synaptics ClickPad. I'll call it the ClickPad from this point on.

I took at a look at the driver. Synaptics say on their website that they have a specific driver for the ClickPad but the driver installed on my XPS 15 turned out to be the standard Microsoft one for a PS/2 Compatible Mouse. Dell don't appear to issue a specific driver for the ClickPad on the XPS range, so there's no additional driver on Dell's support website either.

So what's going on with the driver?

I did a quick search of the Microsoft Update Catalog (http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com) in which all the certified drivers for Windows are listed (and are downloadable) and that does indeed show that Synaptics have certified a Windows 10 driver for the ClickPad. There are in fact two, a, SMBus version and a PS/2 version. However, neither actually pick up the ClickPad when I try to install them. The SMBus one says that the existing Microsoft driver is newer and refuses to install the synaptics one. The PS/2 version installs but does nothing.

So a Synaptics driver for the ClickPad is a bit of a dead end - the only driver that will install is the standard Microsoft PS/2 mouse one.

I then realised that the ClickPad problems were only occurring after the display had been turned off due to the Power and Sleep display timer expiring. By default I think it's set to 5 or 10 mins and I was relying on it to turn off the display when the laptop wasn't being used.

I tried setting that timer to Never and the problem disappeared!

So it seems that whatever the problem actually is, it's being triggered by the display being powered off by the Power and Sleep settings timer.

Anyway I'm now using just a screen saver to turn the display off rather than the power and sleep settings (there's a blank screen saver in Windows 10 that does the job seemingly as well).

Note that shutting the laptop's lid also turns off the display, but that doesn't seen to cause a problem with the ClickPad.

I'd be very interested if others who have had this problem also find if the above workaround resolves it. Hopefully someone from the engineering team at Dell who looks after this aspect of what is otherwise an excellent laptop will come up with a proper fix.