Extremely Sensitive touch pad on HP Mini 210-2090NR

[ScottyK]

On my wife's Netbook she's running 10.10 because of issues upgrading to 11.04 and the Broadcomm card, but it's fixable. However she's not super concerned with the latest and greatest, so we press on.

On the touchpad, I've noticed that it's VERY sensitive. You can barely touch it, and the mouse will jump all over the screen. We have to use an external USB mouse, since the touch pad is all but useless.

I'm thinking it's a hardware issue, and not a Kubuntu issue. For before 10.10 was on there, I remember Windows 7 also running a very sensitive mouse pad.

Any tips/tricks to get some control back to the mouse pad?

One thing I've noticed is her mouse-pad is one solid piece, where my HP Mini 110-3518 has actual separate buttons.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Extremely Sensitive touch pad on HP Mini 210-2090NR

The synclient command line utility allows you to make real-time adjustments to a plethora of touchpad parameters. You can see these parameters in the manual page for the Synaptics driver -- enter man synaptics to see the list.

Specifically, the PressureMotionMinZ, PressureMotionMaxZ, PressureMotionMinFactor, PressureMotionMaxFactor look to be of interest. You can see all your touchpad's default values by running the synclient command with no parameters. To experiment, take a look at the current value of PressureMotionMinZ and then try a higher value, for example synclient PressureMotionMinZ=50.

[ScottyK]

Re: Extremely Sensitive touch pad on HP Mini 210-2090NR

Is the proper context of the command..

synclient PressureMotionMinZ=50

If so, I keep getting this error..

X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
 Major opcode of failed request: 141 (XInputExtension)
 Minor opcode of failed request: 37 (X_ChangeDeviceProperty)
 Serial number of failed request: 22
 Current serial number in output stream: 25

the current value of PressureMotionMinZ = 29, the Max is 159

[SteveRiley]

Re: Extremely Sensitive touch pad on HP Mini 210-2090NR

Hm... I get the same error you did. TBH, I've never had to play with my settings, I was just recalling something I read a while ago wanted to pass the info on to you. Perhaps these settings would work in an xorg.conf?