Broken Synaptics touchpad scrolling in 8.1


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After the update to 8.1, scrolling in Metro apps, IE, and the Start screen isn't as smooth as it was on Windows 8. Scrolling is fine though in other desktop apps such as Chrome.

 

Just wondering if anyone else is seeing similar things happen if they have a Synaptics touchpad? Going by Synaptics's track record I don't expect a fix until probably a month after 8.1 is available for general consumption.

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a month? My touchpad has never worked properly on Windows 8 even with the latest generic drivers from Synaptics website. I wonder how after almost 20 years there are still zero quality standards for touchpads...

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a month? My touchpad has never worked properly on Windows 8 even with the latest generic drivers from Synaptics website. I wonder how after almost 20 years there are still zero quality standards for touchpads...

Yeah, I've never had good touchpad experience in windows, period. Its actually one of the reasons I first started using linux on my laptops. Touchpad drivers for windows have always been horifically buggy, and windows basically has no native touchpad support (last time I checked it just treats them like a generic ps/2 mouse out of the box), so its all down to these aforementioned crappy drivers. I have one laptop with a synaptics touchpad and one with an elantech touchpad, and both have horribly buggy two finger scrolling in windows no matter what driver I use.

 

/rant.

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So two finger scrolling is also broken. Ugh.

Synaptics really needs to up their game on their drivers, if they're going to post a blog post boasting about their 'collaboration' with Microsoft on 8.1. I think it was only in late November that Synaptics posted drivers for Windows 8. Prior to that, any Metro app which wasn't written in HTML and JS (running in WWAHost.exe) would simply not scroll with the touchpad.

Yeah, I've never had good touchpad experience in windows, period. Its actually one of the reasons I first started using linux on my laptops. Touchpad drivers for windows have always been horifically buggy, and windows basically has no native touchpad support (last time I checked it just treats them like a generic ps/2 mouse out of the box), so its all down to these aforementioned crappy drivers. I have one laptop with a synaptics touchpad and one with an elantech touchpad, and both have horribly buggy two finger scrolling in windows no matter what driver I use.

/rant.

Actually I've had a much more frustrating experience with the touchpad on Ubuntu :p I can't get my touchpad to be less sensitive, I can't change how much finger pressure I need to perform a click, etc. Touchpad works fine if I'm running Ubuntu in a VM.

Should also mention, in Windows 8 the default PS/2 driver does actually support scrolling for touchpads. Anything fancier than that, then yeah drivers are needed.

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Using my Thinkpad here with drivers from Synaptics and they seem to work fine. I've been using old drivers for the longest time and only recently upgraded them so took me a while to get used to the "tablet style" scrolling. I can invert it which is how it was before but getting used to it now. Scrolling works for me though :ermm:

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I believe this is caused by smooth scrolling. In Windows 8.1, Windows has it's own smooth scrolling. Maybe there is some kind of settings to disable this in synaptics?

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  • 3 months later...

Just an update to this thread; I took a leap of faith and tried Windows 8.1 RTM, reinstalling the same Synaptics drivers posted on their site. Made sure to run the installer in Windows 8 compatibility mode.

 

Happy to report that scrolling works just fine, even better than Windows 8. :)

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