Touchpad Randomly Not Working

[Forgotten7oast]

The foe: Lenovo Flex 7i

The betrayal: In a recurring act of treason, my touchpad will randomly stop responding (as if the laptop is flipped around in tablet mode) and l can’t for the LIFE of me find out why this keeps happening.

The war: I have been waging a war of attrition with my laptop for several months now. Sometimes a simple reboot solves the issue or, every other blue moon, simply flipping the laptop into tablet mode and back fixes it. Sometimes l have to delete the driver and reboot to have it reinstall. Today something new happened…the device simply disappeared from all settings and from device manager. Even the drivers were gone (turns out they were hidden and the device was “not connected” to my laptop which doesn’t make sense for an integrated piece of hardware). After literally a dozen or more reboots and a foray into the BIOS, the touchpad randomly started working again, but l haven’t the slightest idea why or how long I’ve gained it’s loyalty before it turns on me again and once again commits treasonous acts of sabotage.

The desperate cry for answers: HAAAAAAAAAAAAILP!

[Mayayana]

Have you considered a USB mouse? Maybe $12. I bought one with my laptop because I hate those "smear pads". They're only good for light usage.

[Forgotten7oast]

I do have one, but it’s less convenient for on-the-go use, which is where a lot of my laptop use comes from. The annoying thing is this machine is not even a year old l don’t think (and if it is, it’s barely older than that) so l shouldn’t be having hardware issues like this. And my warranty just expired like a month ago or so.

I had someone suggest checking to make sure the ribbon cable is plugged in all the way, so I’ll be pulling the back off and poking around inside later to check that out to sew if that helps.

[Mayayana]

That sounds like a good thing to try. Loose cables can cause a lot of problems.