Workaround for Finger Sensing Pad on ASUS laptops

History:

I love my ASUS G74Sx laptop, it rocks in so many ways, except... The godawful, horrible, annoying, PITA trackpad.

Let me explain for those who are not yet plagued with the nasty bit of software attached to this otherwise decent hardware. It is my understanding that the Sentelic Finger Sensing Pad is actually very similar to the ones found on Mac laptops and are in fact made by the same company. However, the software to drive them is entirely different. The Mac software is impeccable, smooth scrolling in all directions, almost no lag, perfect execution of acceleration and speed, etc. The Windows software is laggy, inconsistent, and buggy. Most of the time, I use an external mouse with my laptop. I expect the system to disable the trackpad when an external mouse is plugged in, but it doesn't keep that setting for long. The trackpad is very sensitive to the point where a slight touch activates it. Where this becomes a problem is that I'll be happy-go-luckily typing away on my blog, letter, or essay when all of the sudden the trackpad wakes up and moves my cursor to a whole different part of the document. I type faster than my eyes can see (or my brain registers, not sure which) such that it takes a few words before I realize what happened. Then I get mad, I end up deleting some very important text. In any case, this is unacceptable. I've checked to see that the Fn+f9 option to disable the trackpad was still on, and it was. The system tray indicates the trackpad should not be working, but there it is, in all its glory, taking over my mouse movements. Not to mention, there isn't a disable option in device manager. I've scoured the internet for better drivers and software to no avail.

At one point, I thought it might be related to my existing USB mouse. I decided to use a different mouse and thought for a moment that the problem went away, but it just took a random amount of time to show up.

So, what can I do?

If you don't want to bother with reading all the stupid problems I discovered along the way to a resolution, then just click here to go to the solution to this problem. However, it would benefit anyone to read the rest just to learn how Logitech, Windows, and ASUS all work (or rather, don't work) together to create a seemingly impossible problem.

Things to consider:

One thing I had to consider is what happens when I move my laptop and disconnect the external mouse. Sure, I could uninstall the trackpad and reinstall it before moving my computer to a location where I would need the trackpad, then uninstall it when done. That seems like a hassle to me, and I don't want to keep going to device manager to do this either. Plus, the install requires a reboot to work, apparently.

Another weird thing is that the trackpad is treated like a PS/2 mouse rather than a USB mouse. I find this to be very odd, I thought everything was USB these days, including internal mice and keyboards.

I decided to revert to a simple PS/2 mouse driver instead, but the option to disable never showed up. I'm guessing it's because the system doesn't truly allow one to disable a PS/2 device and I believe this to be a BIOS setting since the OS in no way controls or assigns IRQs.

Worse still, Windows will not simply allow me to uninstall the device without a reboot.

Back in the early days of A+ I recall that some computers had APIC (advanced programmable interrupt controller) support. That is, the OS could control IRQ settings. This had to be enabled in the BIOS as to whether the BIOS handled hardware IRQ assignments with or without the option for the OS to change them. On a laptop, it makes little sense for BIOS to give this option to the OS since there is no room for changes. However, we can see that my dilemma requires that I do have this functionality.


An attempted resolution:

Since I've done all this evaluation, I thought it meant that I could purchase one of the new wireless trackball mice with the really small USB receiver. With this, I could simply disable the trackpad in the BIOS and use the wireless mouse all the time.

However, I discovered a new and even more shocking outcome. When I reboot my computer with the trackpad disabled, my keyboard is also disabled. That's right, I have to use the onscreen keyboard just to log in. At first I wasn't sure why this happened and so I reverted back to the way things were previously by re-enabling the trackpad in the BIOS, and then the keyboard worked.

I'm not sure who is at fault here, the BIOS or Logitech? I think it is a combination in that disabling the trackpad might also disable the keyboard, although it didn't do this with my other USB mouse. I noticed when I installed the new mouse that it also installed a keyboard driver, and when I booted into the system with the trackpad and keyboard now disabled, there was only the driver for the non-existent Logitech keyboard. My thought here is that Windows can use multiple mice, but only wants one active keyboard. Since it thinks that there is one based on the new mouse and some BIOS setting, it doesn't see the built in keyboard any longer. With the trackpad enabled, there must be some change in the BIOS in assigning the IRQ so that Windows does not ignore the built in keyboard. I am only guessing at all of this, but it's all really annoying.

I also thought I might have found a workaround. I thought, "what if I uninstall the trackpad, it will disable it until the next boot?" So I tried this. Unfortunately, it doesn't disable it, Windows used a generic PS/2 mouse driver instead, without the option to disable it with the external mouse, thus making this even more annoying, not better.


The Solution!

I thought all was lost and I had one more idea. Why it took me so long to think of this, I can't imagine. Couldn't I just force Windows to use a fake driver? I started looking around the 'net for a fake driver when it dawned on me that I can use any unsupported driver already in Windows. So, I updated the driver to one I selected from a list, I made sure to uncheck the show compatible drivers and selected a generic Logitech Serial mouse.

I rebooted just to make sure it would stay that way, now I don't have any issues, the trackpad doesn't work any more. Eureeka! I only worked on this resolution for a week, it's no big thing ;-)


A request was made to break this down a bit more for the less tech savvy, so I will attempt to do that.

To get to the above screen, go to Start >  Control Panel > Device Manager. You'll have a list similar to the following:

From here look for "Mice and other pointing devices" where you will see "Finger Sensing Pad". Right click on this and go to Properties, then select update driver.

 

From here, click the button that says to "Let me pick..." and it will pop up a new screen. On this screen you have to uncheck the box that says "Show compatible hardware" and you'll see the following: 

 

At this point, it's easy, just pick the same manufacturer as I did in my original screenshot and then pick the same model I did and now you have a completely useless trackpad :-)