Lenovo G555 with updated G550 driver for Alps touchpad doesn't help jumpy-cursor issue

I only recently discovered the Lenovo forums for what the company calls its "value line" laptops, which include the G555 as well as the G430, G460, G550, G560 and others.

I didn't know before I purchased the G555 for the bargain-basement price of $329 that the Alps touchpad in the laptop doesn't work all that well.

Maybe that's why Fn-F8 turns off the touchpad — if you're having too many problems and are using an external USB mouse, you can eliminate touchpad issues by turning the entire thing off.

The problems are more pronounced when tap-to-click is enabled. The funny/tragic thing is that it doesn't look as if tap-to-click can be turned off in Windows 7, but it generally is in Linux (including the GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, which I'm running now). Yes, you can turn off the touchpad entirely but can't turn off tap-to-click.

I hadn't noticed this glaring omission from Windows 7 because I rarely boot into it. The way the story usually goes, hardware always works perfectly in Windows but is hard to get working right in Linux. This time, not so much.

I use a wireless Logitech mouse (the cheap M305) most of the time, and yes, I do turn off the touchpad with Fn-F8 occasionally.

It would be fair to say that many, many Lenovo G5xx owners are unhappy with their touchpad performance. One of the longest threads is for the G550.

A new driver for the Alps touchpad in the G550 (yes, I know I have the G555) is available for 32- and 64-bit Windows 7. Even though I don't have this exact model, a touchpad is a touchpad generally, so I downloaded the version 7.7.1602.501 driver and tried it.

It installed fine, but after a reboot I noticed that my cursor-jumpiness (it just randomly moves around a window and selects characters which are often erased with the next keystroke).

Not being a Windows 7 expert, I decided to do this the "recommended" way. I opened the Control Panel, clicked Hardware and Sound, then clicked Mouse (even though I'm not interested in the Mouse, but the Touchpad, and Windows 7 should know this), then clicked Hardware, then clicked Alps Pointing Device, then clicked Change Settings, then clicked Update Driver, then clicked Search Automatically for Updated Driver Software.

The dialog informed me that my 7.107.1602.320 Alps driver from 4/22/2010 is the latest driver. It isn't using the G550 driver I installed minutes earlier (although the system let me install it). A check on the Lenovo driver page for the G555 cites this same driver (7.107.1602.320) as being the latest but gives a date of 2010-08-26.

And bizarre as it still sounds, there seems to be no way to turn off tap-to-click in Windows 7.

Allow me to present the following dialog:

World: Hey Lenovo, it's 2010. Turning tap-to-click on and off is so ... 2003. So get with it.

Lenovo: I know you bought this laptop because even though it's extremely inexpensive, you though that some of the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad vibe would rub off on it.

That didn't happen.

What you got wasn't just inexpensive. It's also cheap.

This isn't a $329 Thinkpad. That animal doesn't exist.

So live with it and realize that as we enter the lower end of the market by exploiting the Lenovo name's association with the higher-end, better-built Thinkpad line, hundreds of blog posts, forum posts and other expressions of exasperation will brand us as a maker of cheap, faulty hardware that's best avoided, and it will probably hurt our Thinkpad line and drag our entire business downward.

World: Thanks for the warning, Lenovo.

Lenovo: No problem, hapless laptop buyer. Now please move along.

Did you enjoy that? I know I did.

Other than this touchpad business, the Lenovo G555 performs rather well, especially because I wiped the crapware-rich Windows 7 32-bit default operating system and replaced it with a crapware-free Windows 7 64-bit installation.

And 95 percent of the time I'm running Linux, in which I can turn off tap-to-click and get better touchpad performance, even though the rest of my 8-years-older laptops — the ones that still have working touchpads anyway (and yes, they ALL have Alps touchpads, which aren't as good as Synaptics but not as bad as the one in this Lenovo) — invoke tap-to-click just fine.

I generally turn off the touchpad entirely since I prefer using an external USB mouse (and really don't like the cursor jumping around, randomly selecting text that is deleted with my next keystroke).

At least this laptop only cost $329. I'd be really pissed off if I had dropped $500-$800 for it. But any reader of this blog knows that I don't do that sort of thing.

Parting hacky note: I just might deinstall the touchpad driver entirely, then install the G550 driver and see if it works. If any other G555 users see any kind of success in this endeavor, please let me know.

I'm still going to look into hacks that might take care of the jumpy touchpad issue in Linux. I'm somewhat confident that I can figure it out that way.

Later: Here is a thread from the Lenovo forum on the touchpad in the G555 that recommends a 2007 driver from Acer.

Supposedly after installing this driver the system under Windows will allow tap-to-click to be turned off.

The next thing I'll be trying in Windows 7 is deinstalling the "normal" touchpad driver, then installing the G550 driver again. Then I'll try this older driver. I'm unsure whether or not this will work in Windows 7, the driver being so old and all of that (along with the forum posters not being extremely specific about whether or not they're running Win 7 or XP).

All I can tell Windows 7 users of the Lenovo G555 is that you can easily turn off tap-to-click in most Linux distributions. In others it's not so easy, I imagine, but still doable.

It was certainly easy for me in Debian Squeeze with the GNOME desktop, and it should be just as easy in popular distros such as Ubuntu and Mint.

Back when I was running Fedora 13, the default for this touchpad on the Lenovo G555 was tap-to-click turned off, so there was no problem at all. I was only able to turn it back on by modifying a text file (which also enabled me to replicate a right-click on the touchpad). I eventually turned it off because of the jumpiness, and now that I'm running Debian, I don't know how Fedora 14 runs on the Lenovo mostly because of the video issues that are plaguing the G555 in many newer Linux releases (and one of the main reasons I'm continuing to enjoy the still-perfect-video of Debian Squeeze).

Again, the bottom line is that turning off tap-to-click makes the touchpad issue bearable, though it doesn't turn the touchpad into something it's not (i.e. as responsive and accurate as most other touchpads). It remains jumpy, and the cursor wanders. Any kind of dirt or moisture only makes things worse. And it seems like the longer the laptop is running and the hotter the touchpad gets, the worse it performs.

I do hope to clear things up AND have tap-to-click in Linux, but it could take a lot of experimentation, and since things work well enough with tap-to-click shut off (and even better with an external mouse), that's not likely to happen.