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by justabystander 3211 days ago
Synaptics drivers are horrendous. In addition to the terrible performance, mine has given me 10+ bluescreens on Win10. I'd love to remove them, but they're needed for some of the basic functionality. And they also seem to randomly make my mouse laggy (when I'm at a desk and plugged in).

Honestly, a generic trackpad driver that suppliers 2-finger scrolling, 2/3 finger mouse button emulation, and _maybe_ pinch-to-zoom would be all I want. If someone put in some plugin interface with an API so everyone could add the additional magic, it would help people with more complex needs. I'd love to kick synaptics to the curb. They've had decades to write a driver for the only thing they're known for, and yet still can't seem to handle it.

3 comments

> a generic trackpad driver that suppliers 2-finger scrolling, 2/3 finger mouse button emulation, and _maybe_ pinch-to-zoom

On my laptop, a generic “HID-compliant touch pad” driver, made by Microsoft, does all you that including zoom. No third-party software needed, just Windows 10.

Not all touchpads are compatible, but it already works for many Win10 laptops. Mine is Acer BTW, with some Elan touchad.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/pc-oems-ditch-the-cu...

I'd like that, plus configuration of palm detection and the size of the virtual mouse buttons on the touchpad. Their drivers make things just a little bit of hell. It's one place that I would've expected the Windows drivers to shine in comparison to Linux, but my Linux partition is so much more useable.

Synaptics Windows driver: "You want to hold down control to select some files? OK, now you can't move the mouse. You're welcome."

Do you have some kind of other hotkey software installed?

I had SynTP.sys bluescreens with a Clevo laptop, turns out Clevo hook the driver with their Control Centre software and Windows reports that the touchpad driver is causing the problem, rather than the hotkey filter from Clevo [1].

[1] http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/synaptics-causes-bso...

I've got something that listens to other devices (ACPI buttons, etc), but nothing that touches the touchpad. It's also a driver that's specific to the model (the main driver won't handle 3 button devices), so it's not like it shouldn't have undergone testing on the laptop.

I'd still suspect synaptics, as it's probably not checking its input properly. As no other device has problems with this.