Compaq CQ42 450TU issues, anyone found any solution ?

[icarusalive74]

Recently got myself a Compaq CQ42 450TU laptop. It is a rather low-end laptop with the Intel Pentium Dual-Core P6200 @2.13GHz and default 1GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM and 360GB HDD. Being a low-end laptop, it doesn't come with any OS (no Vista, Win 7), and comes with FreeDOS. So I've installed Ubuntu Linux 11.04.<br><br>1. The Synaptics Touchpad is really killing me, because Synaptics doesn't help with identifying right settings/drivers on Linux, and HP doesn't support any OS, so no support. The touchpad is erratic, because the mouse keeps jumping around all over the screen, at the slightest touch. The Touchpad is just lame and bad ergonomics, since it is flush with the palm-rest area, and any super-mild/accidental touch of a small region of the palm is enough to throw the cursor all over the screen, randomly close windows and what not. This is a major pain at the moment.<br><br>2. The area under the left palm where we rest our palm while typing on the keypad, gets fairly hot, unlike anything I've felt so far. This is my 6th laptop (I still own 2 others -- all HP/Compaqs) and no such problem. The temp. gets fairly uncomfortable after using the laptop for a while. This is while using the laptop in a well-ventilated, cool room (airconditioned), on a hard-surface (i.e. a glass-top table).<br><br>Any ideas on how to fix the issues ?<br><br>cheers,<br>Icarus<br>

[Mahadev_hp]

Hi,

Try to Install gsynaptics its a GUI for ubuntu and will allow you to configure your touchpad.

Let me know if it helps 

[Mumbodog]

Windows 7 and XP are supported on that notebook

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&tool=&query=CQ42%20450TU&prod...

Main page for that model

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product?product=5040873&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&tool=&query=CQ42%20450...

[icarusalive74]

@Mumbodog & @dev_tech, thank you both for your replies.

@Mumbodog, your answer has supposedly given me hope on the possibility of a BIOS update (the default/original one leaves me dry mouthed), and also hope for finding good product support information. In future if I decide to move for Win7 (for some good reason), it'd be handy.

Can anyone tell if some PUEL based recovery-CD (like the Hiren's rescue disk or whatever it was called), can be used to run the Rompaq's to update BIOS ? That allows me to temporarily go into Windows, to do the BIOS update. Would stay away from it, if it can brick the laptop.

@dev_tech, for the moment, I am sticking to Ubuntu, and reading up on gsynaptics, synapticsdaemon etc., things look promising. I hope that they do solve my problem. There seem to be a large no. of parameters that can be tweaked, so it's going to be some fun experimentation.

If anyone has the "working well" set of synaptics parameters for this model, would be great it those could be shared.

[icarusalive74]

pls remove the "supposedly" in the first line of my reply. It's an artefact of last minute edit and hurry. Thanks again to you all for replying.