Synaptics and Microsoft mice fight

[NeoChaosX]

I'm having a little problem here dealing with the two mice on my laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron 5100, with a Synaptics touchpad built-in and a Microsoft Wheel Optical USB mouse plugged into the system. I want to disable the touchpad, since one of it's buttons is broke (it keeps automatically clicking with no input from me at random times). HOWEVER:

- I need the Synpatic drivers installed in order to disable the device (If someone can point me to a guide that can disable the touchpad in the 5100's BIOS, all the better). I can't install the Intellipoint Drivers because the Synpatic drivers are already installed. However, that means without the Microsoft drivers, my Microsoft's mouse's scroll settings keep getting reset everytime I boot.

- If I have the Microsoft mouse drivers installed first, then install the Synaptic ones, the menu for the Synpatic device properties is broken, meaning I can't disable the touch pad (or the drivers' annoying icon). ARGH.

So can anyone help out here? Is there a way I can disable the touchpad AND keep my external mouse's scroll settings from resetting all the time?

 

[RealBlackStuff]

The Windows-built-in standard USB mouse-drivers should let you use scrolling without any problems. No need to install those bloated Intellipoint drivers.

 

[NeoChaosX]

Well, you're right. I have the Intellipoint drivers installed, and scrolling on the wheel is STILL reset to 1 line at time everytime I reboot. So now it's just a general mouse problem. Can anybody help me find a way to keep my wheel settings from being reset at every boot?

EDIT Okay, noticed it saved the settings when I uninstalled the Intellipoint drivers, but when I reinstalled the Synaptic ones to disable the touchpad (the Intellpoint uninstalled got rid of the Synaptic menu), the scroll settings are being reset again! Gah! :dead:

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Why do you need drivers for something you don't use or is defective?

 

[StormBringer]

RBS is correct here, the intellipoint drivers are what is causing the problem. Just using the generic drivers supplied by Windows will be sufficient, you should then be able to use the mouse without problems.
You may still want to disable the touchpad from the device manager if you aren't going to use it

Something I've always hated about Dells is that they don't have a switch to quickly turn the touchpad off and on.

 

[NeoChaosX]

I can't disable the touchpad in Device Manager. There's only an option to uninstall the device driver, not much else.

 

[ratrent]

Updated driver

The latest drivers on the Synaptics website don't have this characteristic. (http://12.104.145.229/support/drive.cfm)

Originally, the reason for this behavior (believe it or not, it was a feature rather than a bug, though perhaps a misfeature) was that our driver uses wheelmouse messages for scrolling certain applications. Since the TouchPad has a wider dynamic range in terms of fine vs. gross control over scrolling, it was advantageous to set the wheel scrolling to 1 line so as to allow the user maximum control. It did this at startup, resulting in the observed behavior.

But this seems to have caused more problems than it was worth. So now we let the chips fall where they may.