My main gripe about the Synaptics Touchpad is this very feature. AFAIK you can only turn off tap-to-click by having the Synaptics drivers loaded. I've written Synaptics about this several times, suggesting that the feature should be turned off by default. They never even bothered to respond.

- Collin

In Linux, there's actually a program that specifically turns tapping off. It's called tpconfig. Unfortunately that doesn't help much with XP!

I wonder...is anyone else having as much trouble with XP as I am?



Cheers,

Rob Yale
General Manager

McClear Digital Recording and Post Production Studios
http://www.mcclear.com

You can alleviate the synaptics driver problem by disabling the trackpoint via removal of the ribbon cable that connects it to the systemboard.

It is the only way I've found to fix the issue on any 8xxx series Inspiron I've dealt with.

If you remove the keyboard (easy, just a few screws on the bottom of the notebook) you'll see the two ribbon cables from the keyboard / trackpoint going to a single plug. You can unhook the top of the plug, remove the smaller (trackpoint) ribbon cable, then you won't need the synaptics software to disable the trackpoint - thus you don't deal with either of the known issues.

Hope this helps.

John

Rob,

It was good to find your post. I had also downloaded Synaptics and am glad to know that THAT is the reason the pointer freezes up.

The problem I was looking to solve (and still am, if anyone can help) is that anytime I put my computer into Standby mode or shut down, when I start it back up, it has defaulted back to "TAP TO CLICK" and I have to go into Control Panel again turn that function off.

Anyone know why this would be, or have similar problems?

Thanks,
Jefferson

Jefferson wrote:

> The problem I was looking to solve (and still am,
> if anyone can help) is that anytime I put my computer
> into Standby mode or shut down, when I start it back
> up, it has defaulted back to "TAP TO CLICK" and I have
> to go into Control Panel again turn that function off.

I have the exact same problem and it's driving me CRAZY.
Any solution would be appreciated... though I would prefer not
to have to make hardware modifications (such as have been suggested
here)... isn't there some registry value I can change or something!!!???