HP EliteBook Folio G1: Precision Touchpad and ALPs GlidePoint touchpad drivers have a response delay

[NM230]

Hello,

the EliteBook Folio G1 (2016) allows the choice between MS Precision and GlidePoint. The problem described below occurs on both driver versions. (Please also note that I have configured *all* settings (on all 3 locations where mouse settings can be configured), and I did so in a way that rules out that the problem is a result of misconfiguration. Bios, Windows and Touchpad drivers are up-to-date.)

Problem: When I try to move the cursor just a little bit (which is a very frequent action in everyday computer usage in general (e.g. cursor positiong, checkboxes), and with certain applications (imaging) in particular), there is no response until I have moved my finger over the touchoad a few millimeters (!). This is very annoyng -- it is impossible to do precise operations. In particular, no such issues exist on my other notebooks. I guess it's some kind of protection so no movements are done when accidental touching the touchpad. However, unlike the "prevent-movement after typing"- option, there is no user-visible setting that would allow the user to disable this annoyance. I am actually considering sending the computer back. It is ironic because this is anything but "Precision". (All the other features and behavior of the touchpad are quite good, btw). 

Request: Please forward this problem to your developlemt/software team so they can check whether this can be changed, and then please provide new drivers/etc. They should check whether this can be improved software-side., ASAP.

Thank you.

[Noteboook1]

Thank you for the information. This is a Microsoft Windows 10 bug with precision touchpad features. HP already informed this issue to Synpatics. Synaptics has opened a ticket up with Microsoft to fix this issue.

Thanks,

[NM231]

(I'm NM230)

Hello, thank you for your response.

However:

1. It's an ALPS touchpad

2. The bug occurs with both the ALPS driver AND the MS PTP driver (one can switch between the drivers on this EliteBook)

3. The bug has been present for ages (a year or so) (google for threads on "Dell XPS 13 / PTP / delay") and has still not been sufficiently resolved (what is needed is a general sensitivity slider that should affect 1. general touch pressure sensitivy , 2. the initial physical swipe distance needed to initiate a movement (from 0 mm to x mm) and 3. the time period of an initial movement that passes until a movement is done (also from 0 s to x s). 

4. I noticed the problem is somewhat worse when doing up/down movement than when doing left/right movements (I even turned the computer 90 degrees to make sure it was not an anatomical issue). This is bad news since it might point to an additional hardware deficiancy. A weird observation. But perhaps that's normal and the case with any touchpad, and will be resolved suffiently once a sensitivy slider is implemented.

5. I appreciate that HP seems to acknowledge the issue. In particular note that it might be that MS has already tried to tackle the issue by reducing the delay. However, since I'm on the most current update, it is important to communicate to ALPS and MS that the current state is still not acceptable. I cannot precisely position my cursor in MS paint, for example. 

The deficiencies become apparent when you try to paint nearby dots in a vertical line, starting at the bottom. No problem on my NEC laptop, impossible on the HP. Also, another bug is this : press down the left physical touchpad button on the desktop and then try quickly flicking the cursor up and down or left and right which should quickly draw

selection boxes of various sizes. Hardly anything will happen with PTP enabled. However, whilst the delay bug as described above occurs both with ALPS/GlidePoint and PTP choices (as I said, you can choose in settings which to use), the box drawing bug only occurs in PTP. However the ALPS touchpad has other weird bugs and overall I'd recommend focussing on trying to get the PTP to work properly, and not the GlidePoint version. 

!! I am sending back the laptop because of this. It is my experience that it can take months or even a year or two until this is fixed. You can see YT videos demonstrating the issue on Dell XPS systems.

Also, FWIW/FYI, I have been testing the the FHD version of the EliteBook.

Note that the PrecisionTouchPad registry entries ("CurtainDismissTime/distance" keys) have no effect.

Other than that the touchpad was great, BTW. And speaking of touchpads, with ever-greater resolutions, varying scrolling speeds are becoming an issue, ie. Apps/programs exhibit varying scrolling speeds: It would be good if MS issued a best-practice rule that developers implement an in-app/in-program scroll speed setting multiplier/adjustment.

Some final thoughts on the EliteBook: Excellent chassis, excellent smooth finish of the chassis, great touchpad surface, no coil whine/no noise whatsoever, excellent hinge, great small adapter. Very good also the narrow bezels on the side, but large bezel at the bottom: Large bottom bezel is good for ergonomic reasons (higher screen position). Negative: keyboard too loud and somewhat too stiff; anti-glare option only in FHD which is very noticeably worse to the average eye than a 1440p and upward resolution (1440p would suffice and would be the best choice in terms of res vs battery). Also, an IGZO screen would have been preferable. As to the keyboard layout, note that the space bar can be reduced in width. No-one presses the space bar at its left/rightmost area (see Japenese spacebars which are particularly short yet don't pose an issue). This means you can add up to three buttons to the lowest row (which need not be full size, but can be narrower than normal keys). E.g. an Fn key near the cursor keys so one can pageup/down/home with one hand; and the missing context menu key. A somewhat shorter space bar also reduces noise/rattle. 

[TheDriverDude]

Hello NM230:

If you are going to replace this notebook, I have a word of caution for you: buy one with a traditional touchpad that has external buttons. Otherwise, you will have the same problem with your new notebook.

The problem you are describing only happens with clickpads. It is not really a bug. Rather, it is a side effect of the solution to another problem, which is unintended cursor movement when you are trying to press the button. When you are pressing the entire clickpad, the finger slightly rocks. As a result, the cursor may move, and, instead of clicking on an object, you will drag it. To mitigate this problem, a dead zone has been introduced, where the cursor will not move when the finger moves slightly after the initial touch. Because pressing the button makes the finger move more vertically than horizontally, the dead zone is larger in north/south direction than east/west. In fact, it’s longer south than north because the finger tends to move south when you press the button. You may also notice that the dead zone is larger in the bottom portion of the clickpad, which is where you would normally press the buttons.

The ALPS driver allows you to adjust the size of the dead zone to the point of completely turning it off. In order to do that, you need to adjust the Cursoring_DeadZoneN_Thresh values under the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da}\NNNN\APHF\T4B registry key, where N stands for a decimal numeric character. The exact NNNN key that corresponds to the ALPS touchpad is easy to find because it will likely be the only key that has subkeys. Or you can find it in the Device Manager by double-clicking on the Alps GlidePoint HID Filter under Human Interface Devices and selecting Driver key from the Property list on the Details tab of the Alps GlidePoint HID Filter Properties dialog box.

To turn the dead zone completely off, set all the Cursoring_DeadZoneN_Thresh values to 0 or delete them and then restart the computer.

The above fix will only affect the ALPS driver behavior. The PTP behavior will not be affected. I don’t know if Microsoft has provided any registry values that can be tweaked to fix it.

The other problem you are describing (with short strokes when the button is pressed) is a known PTP problem. It has to be addressed by Microsoft.

[NM231]

Info: When I uninstall the ALPS driver, the small movements _work_.Two finger rightclick also _works_! However, no gestures (two finger scrolling, zoom) work. One cannot configure them. 

In my opinion, this is both an ALPS and MS problem. You need to contact both companies so both ALPS GlidePoint AND PrecisionTouchPad configuration feature a general sensivity slider and a slider to adjust the initial delay (down to almost zero waiting time).

. After uninstalling the driver I can confirm there is NO hardware problem. Minimal up/down/left/right ALL work, and this has NOTHING to do with multi-finger-gestures (because two-finger rightklick works!). So the delay describe above is NOT necessary. But no swiping/zoom gestures is a problem. And general sensivity adjustment silder would still be helpful. 

[NM231]

Hello,

- there are registry entries for PTP that sound a lot as if they affect the problem ("CurtainDismissTime" etc.), but they have no effect for some reason.

- (will try your hacks in a moment)

- it is untrue that the precaution you described is necessary in any way: Now that I have uninstalled the driver, I can use both the physical clickpad buttons and the two-finger-rightclick feature and at the same time navigate small distances, all of these with no issues whatsoever. ZERO problems. So it is NOT a necessary precaution. It just works great. There is no reason whatsoever to add the delay in order to add the functions 2-finger-zoom and 2-finger-scroll, because now already two-finger-right-click works without requiring that single finger swipes are delayed. 

[NM231]

EDIT: weird. after a logoff suddenly scrolling with two finger has started to work! (I did reboot after driver uninstall. I don't know the reason why it didn't work a moment ago. But now everything works except pinch zoom and advanbed gestures. I also rebooted once again and it continues to work.

I.e., now scrolling with two finger, two finger right click, and minimal one finger movements all work! great!!! very happy. 

[NM231]

No I will re-think sending it back:-D

[NM231]

- for some reason with uninstalled drivers, sometimes two finger scrolling worked, and sometimes not. (it had nothing to do with whether the area underneath the mouse was currently active).

- the registry changes DID work. Initial one-finger micromovements in the GlidePoint Driver now are precise. 

THANK YOU A LOT. 

- however, there still is lag when doing two finger scroll.

- I found PTP (precision touch pad) entries within the Alps touchpad registry entry (APHF): 

E.g. PTPDeadZone-Enable.

- And of course there are MS PTP registry entries: 

E.g. CurtainDismissTime

Why does neither have any effect? (At least setting all of these to 0 did not help.)

(I'd still prefer the PTP driver due to some of bugs Alps driver.)

- BTW, there are lots of settings in APHF. I wonder if any of these affects general sensitiviy. (and as mentioned the threshold when scrolling) Also, even though these seem to be general ALPS registry settings (probably not restricted to HP), I found it curious that googling the keys mostly yielded not one result. A list with the effects of all those keys would be really intersting...! 😄

[NM231]

(Scrolling with the ALPS GlidePoint driver is terribly jumpy. Suddenly it jumps to a much faster speed. I.e. at first it does not react at all, then after some millimeters it starts to scroll slowly, and all of a sudden it will increase the speed far too much. No matter which speed setting one chooses, it's always erratic. MS is much better. Also the mouse accelaration is worse than original windows. With original windows mouse accelaration, you get precise slow speeds at small distances and good acceleartion for fast long disstance sweeps. GlidePoint tries to mimic this, but not well. The accelaraiton curve is not strong enough, i.e. it's either not precise enough in small distance movements, or long distance movements don't go far enough. That's why GlidePoint, even though the delay issue has now been fixed (except for scrolling), is not the solution to touchpad woes on this device, sadly. 

Edit: Did a lenghty comparison of scrolling with GlidePoint and PTP. It is like night and day. PTP is abolut perfect for scrolling: precisise, smooth, great. And also normal mouse pointer movements/acceleration (one finger) is perfect. BUT it has the delay (which could be easilty fixed if microsoft/ALPS allowed the tweak, just as it works with GlidePoint. Note that the delay behavior seemed identical both in GlidPoint and PTP.

What a pity, three options (GlidePoint, PTP, and basic driver), and they all have at least one no-go. 😞

Solution: Please, HP, fix the delay on the PTP driver.