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

I've seen this problem on a few Dell M6500's I received this week.  (On at least 3 machines out of 8.)   Thanks for your postings.   I was about to call in a Dell tech but will try the generic Synaptics driver first.  

Chris

Chris, are you saying that you have 5 brand new M6500's that do not have this problem at all?  If so, is there any correlation with the build dates?

Dell seems to have gone quiet on this.

Their tech guys emailed that same post above saying to install the Synaptics driver in the link...but the link is dead.

Has anybody found a Synaptics driver that fixes this???

In July I received 8 brand new Dell M6500's.  Opened up 5 of them and they had serious issues with the mousepad buttons working only intermittently.  Had a Dell tech come out to work on one and replacing the touchpad hardware didn't fix it so I shipped those units back. 

This week (Tuesday August 3rd) received 8 replacement M6500's.   Have tested 7 of them.  So far 4 of those 7 seem to work fine but three of them definitely have the touchpad tracking issue reported on this thread.   (Buttons work fine but touchpad is erratic after a few minutes of use.)   I've got the same software loaded on all 7 of these units.  Whether I use my own Windows 7 Enterprise image or the default Windows 7 image from Dell, same issue.

My original M6500's had BIOS A02.   This week's M6500's are BIOS rev. A04.    I'm going to go looking for that Synaptics driver as I'm going out of country in a few days and would like to have my touchpad working if possible.

Note:  Another problem with Dell M6500's (both batches I've received) is that (with default settings) if a non-bootable USB device is plugged in, the systems won't boot.   Fortunately rearranging the boot order in the BIOS settings is a work-around we can use.

Chris

I had no problems finding and installing the generic Synaptics driver referenced in the Dell discussion thread on M6500 touchpad problems.

But this does not appear to be a solution.   Problem still exists and the touchpad buttons are non-responsive half the time as well.   (Like my original batch of M6500's that I've sent back.)   This generic driver is an older driver and I’m beginning to suspect that our original Dell M6500 hardware may not have been physically defective but that it too had an older touchpad driver.

I have alerted my Dell support rep about this issue.  He is working within Dell to get it escalated.

Don't expect to find any help from Dell here. I asked (Three times before I got a response) and this is what they think of using the forum as a troubleshooting resource. " I did not realize, initially, that your main concern is the information posted on the Dell Forum. The Forum is open to every member of the general public, and users with widely varying levels of skill and experience have the same publishing rights as trained and experienced ones. I find the information posted on the Forum interesting, and sometimes even informative, but I cannot rely on it for Warranty Hardware Support. I especially cannot instruct a user to install an unknown driver from a third party web site based on an unverified assessment of its suitability."

This was from:

US_Business_Ownership_TMPA

Stephen P.
Dell Workstation Support
11:00 PM - 08:00 AM EST S-Th
1-877-671-3355

The fix they posted that I was also sent by Dell ProSupport does not work.

My Dell tech sent me a new link to that Synaptics driver, so I was then able to follow that fix 100%.

Out of interest, the driver they are pointing us to was released in January, and was the very same one that my machine came installed with.

So essentially they are just assuming that we have outdated drivers or they think that simply reinstalling the driver will fix it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

If you Google "Dell M6500 touchpad" then this forum link is actually the second down in the list.

What's weird is, is that I have some new Dell M6500's (from the very same batch as the troublesome ones) that appear to not have the problem.  They've got the exact same software as the problem units.    So perhaps the problem just isn't the driver.   ???????

Seems odd that a hardware issue would correct itself by re-booting...but I'm willing to hope!

Has anyone out there corrected this issue by letting the Dell techs swap over their touchpads?

Or has it only ever gone away with a whole new machine?

Please let us know.

I'd rather not suffer the pain of a machine swap.

I've got an M6500 running Debian Linux (lenny release) that has the same problem, so I'm petty sure it's not just a driver issue (though hopefully a driver or BIOS update can /fix/ the issue). I haven't seen the dead area, but the mouse cursor jumping left occurs frequently. I haven't checked by BIOS version yet, but I'll post here if a BIOS update fixes it.

For those who may be curious about M6500 and linux support, it works great (except, of course, touchpad), including sound and wireless. Wireless does require Kernel 2.6.32 iwlagn drivers though, and the if you need RAID, just use md. Ignore the onboard fakeraid junk.

I'll be in contact with a high-level Dell technician later today (Tuesday Aug. 10).   I'll provide him with all the details of what I've learned.   My thinking at the moment is that this is indeed a hardware issue.  (Or some sort of combination driver/hardware.)  Though a strange one as, on select machines, I can reboot and all will be fine for a while.  Then suddently the touchpad go bad on me.   But of the last 8 Dell M6500's  I received (last week) only 3 of them have this problem.   The others seem fine.  Never having a touchpad issue.

The first batch of Dell M6500s I received in July were worse.   Touchpads were okay but the touchpad buttons were very intermittent.   Having a Dell tech replace the touchpad hardware did not fix the issue.   I sent all those 8 units back to Dell.  At least on my current batch all the units have reliable touchpad buttons, even the 3 with the defective tracking have reliable buttons.

I flashed the BIOS of my m6500 from A02 to A04 last week and the user reports that the problem hasn't reoccurred for almost a week now. Latest BIOS seems to fix the issue, at least on Linux.

If it helps others, I'm running Debian Lenny with the 2.6.32-bpo.5-amd64 kernel package from the lenny-backports repository.

My BIOS was already at A04, and it made no difference.

Dell asked me to remove all of my Control Point software - which I did - and that made no difference also.

The Dell tech will be here in a few hours to swap some hardware around.

Given previous posts in this thread I'm not convinced that touchpad swapping means that my problems are all behind me now.

Yes.  My whole 2nd batch of (8)  M6500's was at A04 BIOS and I had 3 units with touchpad problems.    Yesterday a Dell tech came out to replace the touchpad, keyboard, and motherboard of one of my problem units.  But he didn't bring the motherboard.   Went ahead and had him replace the keyboard and touchpad (for the 2nd time) on this unit.    So far, so good.   Problem has not re-occurred on this unit.

I also took home another M6500 (that did not appear to have any problems) this past weekend and gave the touchpad a good workout.  Spent about 3-4 hours using the touchpad and  I did not experience any problems.    

So my current "theory" this that this is indeed a hardware or some short of design/hardware issue affecting many but not all Dell M6500's.   Unfortunately there is no guarantee that the hardware your tech will bring out will be "good hardware".   Just keep sending out those techs until they get it right or return the unit for a different model.   All my research and experience indicates that this problem (within Dell) seems unique to this model.   I've just staged a number of Precision 4500's with absolutely no issues.

Was contacted by Dell today.  They have reviewed this thread as well as my own experiences and Dell Engineering is now aware of the Dell M6500 touchpad issue.    In a few days I'll be sending Dell one of our defective M6500's for their analyses.