I know this has been looked at before, but this problem seems to be different. Acer Travelmate 2420 XP Home SP3, 2 gig ram and 2 NTFS partitions, C: with 4 gig free, D: with 10 gig free.
Was very overloaded with rarely used programs, and ran like a tortoise in frozen treacle. So I did some cleaning up. Dumped some downloaded Linux iso files, removed some unused programs - in the recommended way via control panel. Used Toniarts Easycleaner (which has never done me any harm) to remove unnecessary files, and registry entries. Defragged using O&O Defrag 2000 freeware. Things were getting faster, but still not enough. The Touchpad seemed to be working as it should for a little while, it had been difficult to use before, so I often used a USB mouse.
Found I had another cleaner, CCleaner by Piriform, which I think cleaned up more than it should (so I cannot recommend it). Odd things like Zonealarm firewall started blocking out some browsers, IE7, Firefox (still only runs in safe mode) and Chrome but not Opera, Ping was blocked, even for my LAN. Reinstalled ZA which fixed some of that, but Chrome now runs V. slowly, needs reinstalling.
Apart from that it is generally much faster and responsive, which means I can now see how the Synaptic Touchpad has been playing up (I couldn't tell before because everything was so slow and unresponsive.)
I have removed the old Synaptics driver (V7.13?), and on the basic MS mouse driver the touchpad behaved the same as described below. I put in a new Synaptics driver (V12.2.2), and there's no real change.
I need to right-click twice to bring up the dialog.
I cannot left-click drag to select anything - not text, files or make a selection box in MSPaint.
I can tap to click, but not left-click.
Using Fn F7, I can disable the touchpad, and use a USB optical mouse, for a second or two then I get a "USB device not recognised..." message, then a little later it becomes usable again. In Device Manager, the HID-compliant mouse either disappears, or gets a yellow warning, or it is the USB Human Interface Device that shows the error.
When it works, I can drag and drop, select, Scroll and click all mouse buttons as normal. Toggling Fn F7, Both touchpad and mouse work, with the additional functionality that the touchpad middle button becomes able to scroll L-R and Up and Down. This functionality disappears when the USB mouse is unplugged, until I double-tap on the right part of the touchpad, when it returns.
I downloaded and patched in the registry fix "dragndropx.zip" ( but there was no improvement. The next ritual will be to take the battery out, and sacrifice it under the Perigean full moon, on January 30th at 09:04, unless anyone here can think of an alternative, apart from a reinstall, which is the last thing I want to do - I want eventually to dual boot it with the SuperOS Ubuntu distro, which will then be my main OS.
XP Home has been on this laptop since I first ran it on 06/07/2006, and I only had my first BSOD yesterday, trying to fix these niggles. You get quite sentimental.
Was very overloaded with rarely used programs, and ran like a tortoise in frozen treacle. So I did some cleaning up. Dumped some downloaded Linux iso files, removed some unused programs - in the recommended way via control panel. Used Toniarts Easycleaner (which has never done me any harm) to remove unnecessary files, and registry entries. Defragged using O&O Defrag 2000 freeware. Things were getting faster, but still not enough. The Touchpad seemed to be working as it should for a little while, it had been difficult to use before, so I often used a USB mouse.
Found I had another cleaner, CCleaner by Piriform, which I think cleaned up more than it should (so I cannot recommend it). Odd things like Zonealarm firewall started blocking out some browsers, IE7, Firefox (still only runs in safe mode) and Chrome but not Opera, Ping was blocked, even for my LAN. Reinstalled ZA which fixed some of that, but Chrome now runs V. slowly, needs reinstalling.
Apart from that it is generally much faster and responsive, which means I can now see how the Synaptic Touchpad has been playing up (I couldn't tell before because everything was so slow and unresponsive.)
I have removed the old Synaptics driver (V7.13?), and on the basic MS mouse driver the touchpad behaved the same as described below. I put in a new Synaptics driver (V12.2.2), and there's no real change.
I need to right-click twice to bring up the dialog.
I cannot left-click drag to select anything - not text, files or make a selection box in MSPaint.
I can tap to click, but not left-click.
Using Fn F7, I can disable the touchpad, and use a USB optical mouse, for a second or two then I get a "USB device not recognised..." message, then a little later it becomes usable again. In Device Manager, the HID-compliant mouse either disappears, or gets a yellow warning, or it is the USB Human Interface Device that shows the error.
When it works, I can drag and drop, select, Scroll and click all mouse buttons as normal. Toggling Fn F7, Both touchpad and mouse work, with the additional functionality that the touchpad middle button becomes able to scroll L-R and Up and Down. This functionality disappears when the USB mouse is unplugged, until I double-tap on the right part of the touchpad, when it returns.
I downloaded and patched in the registry fix "dragndropx.zip" ( but there was no improvement. The next ritual will be to take the battery out, and sacrifice it under the Perigean full moon, on January 30th at 09:04, unless anyone here can think of an alternative, apart from a reinstall, which is the last thing I want to do - I want eventually to dual boot it with the SuperOS Ubuntu distro, which will then be my main OS.
XP Home has been on this laptop since I first ran it on 06/07/2006, and I only had my first BSOD yesterday, trying to fix these niggles. You get quite sentimental.
