Touchpad on AOA 150 doesn't work? *NOW HAS PICTURES!!*

Howdy everyone! I just bought my Aspire One AOA 150 last night from a guy locally and I love it so far!! It runs perfect for gaming (those good ol' games for LAN parties) and just what I need it for! Only one problem though, the mouse touchpad doesn't work!!

When I bought it from the guy it wasn't working and he said just go to erestore and install drivers from there. Well, silly me I tried installing windows 7 first and deleted all the partitions (including the erecovery one!!), so now I'm stuck!! With win7, it doesn't even see the touchpad so I decided (after going to Acer's website and installing the touchpad driver with no luck) to install XP again. Well, now it is seen in Device Manager but as an HID compliant device. Okay, no biggie, I'll just install the drivers right? Wrong!! I went to Acer's website again, downloaded and installed the touchpad drivers (amongst all the others, too) and to my amazement, nothing!! After restarts, of course. Now in Device Manager it shows Touchpad Device, but it's got the yellow ! next to it so I clicked it. Error code 23 came up, which is the device isn't working or driver's aren't all installed. So I uninstall, reinstall, reboot. I did this about who knows how many times and ZERO luck!

Anyway, I went on and found tinyxp for Acer and hoped for the best. Installed it and that's what's on there now and guess what?! It doesn't even show in Device Manager. Yay. By the way, the laptop was obviously opened, so I'm thinking he forgot to plug in the ribbon cable for the mouse or something, but why would it show up in device manager if it wasn't? Strange. Now I'm downloading tiny7 because I LOVE win7 sooo much better than any other OS out there already!!

So what do you all think? I've installed TONS of synaptics touchpad drivers (even different versions) and have had no luck. I'm not computer illiterate, I've been working on them and building them for years. This is totally stumping me though, and I can't wait for my RAM to come in so when I upgrade it, I can finally see what the heck is going on inside of this netbook. Until then, I push along with the annoyance of no touchpad and having to carry my mouse with me everywhere. Sigh.

Please help!!

Oh yeah!! And does ANYONE know where I can find an .iso or something for the erecovery partition? Maybe sticking that back on will fix my problem!

EDIT: Here is an included picture of the ribbon cable!! I think it may be the problem, but I want to get some confirmation first And if so, where could I get a new one?

 

Re: Touchpad on AOA 150 doesn't work?

Hm. The touch pad doesn't show up in my W7. Maybe a silly question, but you notice the Fn+F7 combination. It took me a while.

 

Re: Touchpad on AOA 150 doesn't work?

My AOA 150 started doing the same thing intermittently till it just quit all together. As it turned out I sent it to Acer and they ended up replacing the whole top bezel of the computer, that fixed the problem. The morel of the story is, if the hardware is bad all the drivers in the world won't fix the problem.

 

Re: Touchpad on AOA 150 doesn't work?

Yeah, I alreasy know about the Fcn + F7 thing lol!! I tried it a bunch but nothing was working

And it's been opened by the guy I bought it from and he did kind of a crappy job putting it together. Maybe that's why I got such a good deal on it? My RAM comes in 2 days so then I'll be able to open it up CLEANLY and see if the ribbon cables are all connected properly. Hopefully if worst comes to worst it's a cheap fix

 

Re: Touchpad on AOA 150 doesn't work?

I think I found the problem!! Take a look at my ribbon cable, I posted the pic above

I'm not a master at detecting bad cable, but this looks to be the weak link. Am I correct? If so, where can I get a new one?

 

Just cut it where it's obviously been creased and use it like that (if it's still long enough).

 

I forgot to post!! I found the problem! There were actually two, but they were simple!

1. Cut the ribbon cable shorter to a good tip with all connections
2. Flip the ribbon cable over. The guy put it in the wrong way when he took it apart lol!!
3.
4. Save TONS of money on my netbook since he didn't have a "working mouse"

 

This forum is great. My ACER is my trunk computer. It's small, doesn't see a lot of run time but I can always count on it to work right when I go to it. The touch pad stopped working yesterday. Logging onto here I discovered fn-F7 combo and it is back like new.

Thanks.

Ronaldo