Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I have a T520boosted by an SSD. It does everything I need, so I decided to fix its exterior a bit since a drop had some of the plastics cracked and later fallen off.

So I purchased a used palmrest, which came with a touchpad and a fingerprint scanner. Notice that my laptop originally did not have a fingerprint scanner.

I replaced the entire palmrest component and connected the touchpad cable. The fingerprint scanner works fine, it is recongized by Windows Hello.

However, I have some issues with the touchpad and mouse buttons. Occasionally the touchpad TAP or one of the two mouse buttons (sometimes the left one, sometimes the right one) will stop working. And so, I can scroll with the touchpad, but clicking won't work.

Could this be due to some sort of incompatibility between my motherboard and the fingerprint reader or have I just purchased a defective part? If so, can the touchpad alone be replaced (maybe use my old one with the new palmrest)? I haven't tried to disassemble that yet, but I saw that it's held by two screws.

Thanks in advance!

Those buttons are part of the keyboard.
The touchpad is separate and can be replaced with your 'old' one.

fredboyce wrote: ↑

Thu May 09, 2024 3:12 am

Could this be due to some sort of incompatibility between my motherboard and the fingerprint reader or have I just purchased a defective part? If so, can the touchpad alone be replaced (maybe use my old one with the new palmrest)? I haven't tried to disassemble that yet, but I saw that it's held by two screws.

Thanks in advance!

Touchpad button assembly is easy enough to separate and swap, trackpoint buttons are part of the keyboard.
Fairly confident swapping that across would fix your problem as it sounds like the membrane traces on the touchpad button are damaged and shorted together with some resistance. Those are surprisingly easy to damage - just click the mouse button with a sufficiently wet finger and it's possible the button will stop working once the liquid seeps through