T440p touchpad replacement gone wrong

[whatsuphelpline]

After dealing with the clunkpad for two years I finally decided to replace it with the T450 trackpad, which has turned out to be a disastrous decision so far. Hoping someone with similar struggles might be willing to help me troubleshoot.

First thing - the clamp that would hold the ribbon cable in place disintegrated into multiple pieces as soon as I touched it. Currently am holding it in place with a piece of tape, however not entirely sure that this is enough to make good contact with the headers - have seen online that people recommend white-tac for this purpose, though I'm not so familiar with the product so thought I would look to people here for advice.

Second thing - I'm pretty sure the trackpad is a Synaptics one (has the characteristic bumps along the bottom and the seller said that it was before purchase), however none of the drivers I have tried have managed to install a driver, and instead throw up driver not installed messages no matter what, whether I follow the instructions for modifying the .ini file or not. For that matter, even trying the original clunkpad in the device produces no result at present. Absolutely no functionality from either at present, which would indicate to me that it's not being detected at all? Perhaps related to the broken clamp or a broken ribbon cable? If anyone has any ideas on troubleshooting this I'm willing to try just about anything at this point.

Thanks for your time if you bothered reading this, am just about at the end of my rope here.

[RealBlackStuff]

Is the broken clamp on the motherboard or on the touchpad?
What OS are you using?

[whatsuphelpline]

Thanks for the reply - broken clamp is on the motherboard unfortunately, and am using Windows 10 Pro.

Spent a bit of time on it today and though I've really made no progress at all I believe I was able to at least reinstall the original driver. No response at all from trackpoint or clunkpad or touchpad still.

Have ordered a couple of replacement cables to try and rule that aspect out - figure there's not much harm in doing so early given shipping times at the moment and someone in NZ will probably want them if I don't.

[whatsuphelpline]

(by original driver I mean the driver for the clunkpad)

[RealBlackStuff]

Did you follow driver instructions here? viewtopic.php?f=68&t=126860

[whatsuphelpline]

Yeah have followed those instructions as far as I can tell - tried the process multiple times with the driver linked in that forum post as well as other drivers recommended (in between removing the old one and restarting to be safe).

Forgive my ignorance, but should the driver still be able to install even if the device is not detected? And does Windows install a generic driver for the trackpad when it's detected? Just a couple of questions that I haven't really found clear answers to so far that I thought you might know the answer to.

[jjmac]

I'll answer based on my own recent experience upgrading my T440p to a T450s Synaptics trackpad. At first, I did not insert the cable completely into the new trackpad, and, as a result, the device was not connected and did not appear in Windows when I booted up.

should the driver still be able to install even if the device is not detected?

Not in my experience, no. The driver did not install correctly until I re-inserted the cable.

does Windows install a generic driver for the trackpad when it's detected?

No. The new trackpad was unusable in Windows until I manually installed the correct drivers. On the other hand, also I tried a bootable Ubuntu USB drive, and the trackpad functioned perfectly there using generic drivers (after I re-inserted the cable, of course).

[whatsuphelpline]

Resurrecting a dead post here to state that replacing the motherboard (in the name of a single tiny plastic hinge) has completely fixed the issue - guess it really needs to be clipped in there to make any kind of contact. Took a couple of months to arrive from China, but as soon as I managed to get it boot the new Trackpad was recognized. Middle button doesn't work but I'm not too mad about that for now.