I took a laptop from the “used” stack when I took over as Commander of the local DAV. As it had belonged to one of our Chapter Service Officers, I didn’t even boot it to the OS prior to wiping the hard drive. Our older batch of laptops came with Windows 10 Home Edition and I wanted to upgrade to Pro, so I decided to try a clean install of Windows 11 Professional. The install was straight-forward, and the computer has been running flawlessly since, with two exceptions. First: the touchpad was overly sensitive and made typing challenging. Second: the Wifi connection drops randomly on one specific Comcast based network. I spent some time fixing the former this last week and the laptop is a lot more useful now.
The touchpad issue was resolved by locating and installing the correct WIndows 10 driver. This was not a particularly straightforward process as the current version will not install, and tosses an error that it is “not compatable” with this version of the OS. OK, I get that it doesn’t like Windows 11, but the Machine is dual-bootable and it didn’t install in 10 either. What I finally wound up doing was working backwards with the HP support site versions until I found a driver that installed. In my case it was the version for Windows 10 (1809) dated December, 2018.
Then I booted to Windows 11 and wound up doing the following:
- Uninstall any current version of the Synaptics driver through Add or Remove Programs.
- Open the Device Manager, locate your Touchpad under Mice and other Pointing Devices
- Right click and select Properties.
- Select the driver tab, and Uninstall Device.
- Reboot if required
- Install the new driver
- Reboot
- Access the Touchpad settings though the Settings app>Bluetooth and Devices>Touchpad>More Touchpad Settings
- You should see the Synaptics setting page now and be able to disable internal pointing device…
Note: I purchased the Windows 11 license as well as Office from Key Incentive. I’ve used them for a number of Windows 10 and 11 as well as MS Office purchases for our Service Officer computers. They are reasonable and reliable, with their keys activated directly through Micro$oft.