Posted by: kurtsh | September 9, 2012

INFO: Samsung Series 9 with Windows 8 – what to do about the TouchPad?

This may seem obvious for some however the touchpad of the Samsung Series 9 is, as most people have discovered, difficult to use when the default driver for mice is used.  The thing moves slowly, you can’t disable tapping, you can’t turn on multitouch gestures, you can’t optimize palm rejection, etc.

There’s two options:

OPTION #1:  INSTALL THE WINDOWS 7 DRIVER
The easy answer is to simply download and install the Windows 8 x64 driver into Windows 8.  I installed the driver using Windows 7 compatibility mode just to be safe and lo-and-behold, it was just fine to use after doing so.  (And making some configuration changes to the driver via CTRL PANEL-MOUSE, of course)

You SHOULD be able to click on the link below and just download the Windows 7 Touchpad driver fro the Samsung Series 9 here:

imageIf for some reason this doesn’t work, try this:

When you load the page, scroll to the tab called “Manuals & Downloads” and click it. What you’re looking for is a driver called “Touchpad (Driver) (ver.2.9.0.0)” dated Nov 25, 2011.  It’s a 194.6MB download.

Yeah – pretty big for a simple driver I know but part of the explanation for this massive download size is in the post I wrote called “Making configuration changes to the Samsung Series 9 touchpad” below.

image

After successfully installing the x64 drive, apply the optimizations that I write about here:

OPTION #2:  INSTALL THE ELAN WINDOWS 8 DRIVER
Here’s the thing:  I found some real Windows 8 Drivers for an Elan Touchpad.  Why do you care?  This is the touchpad brand that ships on many current Samsung Series 9 systems.

You’ll notice however that I didn’t say “ALL” current Samsung Series 9 systems.  The reason is, early Samsung Series 9 models shipped with the Synaptics touchpad and Synaptics drivers.  Later on, for whatever reason, Samsung started shipping Elan touchpads and Elan drivers – so if you download the touchpad driver from the Samsung web site, you’ll download a massive 180MB file that contains the drivers for both Synaptics & Elan in them, since the driver pack has no idea which touchpad your laptop has.

If you check your Samsung and you see under CTRLPANEL –> Device Manager:  “Mice”, the name “ELAN PS/2 port Smart-Pad”, you know you have a ELAN touch pad and the driver below will work.

The benefit of the Windows 8 driver is that it will enable “Windows 8 Gesture Support” meaning you can swipe-in from left to switch apps, swipe-in from right to display charms, swipe in from top to display app controls, as well as multi touch gestures for scrolling and zooming.

IMPORTANT:  You MUST uninstall any previous ELAN software that you’ve installed previously.  Go into Programs & Features & “uninstall” anything that reads “ELAN blahblahblah” then reboot before you install the Windows 8 drivers below (and reboot again after doing the new driver install), otherwise the Mouse Tab for configuring the touchpad options won’t display correctly.  If you screwed up and installed over the old ELAN software, just uninstall everything, reboot, then reinstall the Windows 8 ELAN drivers below… then reboot one more time.  (You will probably need to plug in a USB mouse to have some sort of mouse control.)

imageWAIT… WHAT IF I HAVE THE SYNAPTICS TOUCHPAD?
I’m afraid right now, that there’s no official drivers publicly available yet.  Synaptics doesn’t appear to have made the SGS 12.3 Windows 8-designed drivers available yet.

If you’re curious however as to what they do and how to use them once you get them, here’s the product page for the drivers:

———————–

(Note:  Alright, alright, alright.  So if you’re super-curious, I have in fact found some Synaptics drivers with the version number of “16.2.12.3” published 9/7/12 for both 32bit & 64bit.  Sound interesting?  Yeah, I thought so.  The problem is I don’t have a Synaptics touchpad to test this on any more so I have no idea if these work however here’s the link if you really feel daring.  Caveat installer.)

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