I have a task to fix one Acer Aspire 5100 Also known as Acer Aspire 5100-5023. After re-installing Windows XP on the notebook, I've downloaded correct laptop touchpad drivers as provided by acer.com's website here (TouchPad Section).There inside the ZIP, I've run all the 3 installers provided by Touchpad Driver Synaptics 8.2.19.0 .zip (e.g. Setup.exe, Elantech/setup.exe, Synaptics/Setup.exe).
When all installations were completed, after each one I had to do the standard restart.
For my surprise after Windows boot while testing TouchPad (scratching over it) the TouchPad moved the Mouse Pointer but, after a sec it stopped responding. This is the first time I face such problem so, my guess was either something is wrong with TouchPad Driver or / and the Driver is broken.
To make sure all is fine and driver show properly installed I checked if it is showing correctly installed in:
Control Panel -> System -> Hardware ->Device Manager
There all seem normal under:
Mice and other pointing devices menu I can see
PS/2 Compatible Mouse
Having this situation as you can guess I re-install TouchPad with a couple of driver versions , this not helped either. So after a bit of search on the net. I've got the solution to not responding TouchPad pointed in this Q&A thread
Solution was as easy as just pressing Fn + F7 key. I guess by mistake someone while testing the Function keys on this laptop disabled TouchPad device. The owner of the laptop had no idea about function keys so he never thought of this causes the whole issue. It seems stupidly enough Acer made the laptop function key remember the Function key choice, even after computer restart (pressing Fn+somenumber probably sets some settings in BIOS, so on next boot the settings keeps saved). BTW it might be worthy say, even re-installing with brand new Windows XP does not change a previously set Function setting. Actually it is rather strange why vendors make touchpads possible to disable; I never heard of anybody willing to disable his TouchPad ….
Also I've some people suggest Fn + F6 as a fix to those weird freezed TouchPad Problem, but I believe this are just rumors. Well that's, if you have the same Free Unresponding TouchPad on Acer another Notebook brand name, just enable pressing Fn + F7 keys or whatever Fn + Fx is on the notebook model.
Hope this helps someone 🙂