Hi all,
I have a situation that I created for myself and don’t know how to recover from.
I have an Acer Aspire 5570z laptop that I have downgraded to Windows XP.
Due to that fact that this machine is configured by Acer to be a Vista machine, I wasn’t able to find all of the device drivers on Acer’s web site for this machine running XP Pro. I ran a device driver update program and found a newer driver for the machines card reader.
I installed this driver and the touchpad stopped working.
I found that if I attached an external mouse, I can use it without a problem. In an effort to recover the functionality of my touchpad, I reinstalled the driver for the touchpad. Nothing happened. I installed an older driver for the card reader thinking that it might help. Nope. I look for other drivers for both the touchpad and the card reader. Nothing I try brings back functionality to the touchpad.
I finally decided to reinstall windows xp pro to see if that would help. In the process of doing this, I also deleted the drive partition, recreated it, formatted it, and installed windows xp.
Still no functionality from the touchpad.
The way I see it now, I have two more options. One is to have the bios reflashed on the machine. My thinking there is that the new card reader driver that I had installed has done something to the bios. The other option would be to replace the touchpad in the laptop. My supposition here is that something about the card reader driver has damaged the touchpad hardware.
Before I take these drastic steps, I thought I would ask for advice from those who know more about these types of things than I do.
Thanks for taking the time to read this epistle.
Doug
