How To Fix Unresponsive Touchpad After Wake From Sleep On Windows 10
Windows 10 has had a long standing bug whereby various features and components become unresponsive after a system wakes from sleep. For the most part this bug effects the Start menu or the lock screen. That said, there seems to be a problem whereby a small numbers of users get an unresponsive touchpad after your system wakes from sleep. If you’re getting this same problem, here’s how you can fix it.
SPOILER ALERT: Scroll down and watch the video tutorial at the end of this article.
Unresponsive Touchpad
This problem can be reproduced by booting to your desktop and allowing the boot to complete. Once your system is ready, close the lid to your laptop, or use the power button menu to put your desktop to sleep. Once the system is asleep, wake it up right away. Your touchpad will be unresponsive. You might be able to move the cursor around but no clicks will register and any time you tap on your touchpad, the current active window will lose focus.
I encountered this same error on my laptop and while this is anecdotal, it might benefit to know that the bug could also be reproduced on my system when I connected or disconnected hardware e.g., an iPhone, or an external monitor. The bug is ‘fixed’ temporarily by restarting your system but there is a permanent fix.
Touchpad Driver
The problem, as you can guess, has to do with your driver. At some point, perhaps as a result of a Windows update or something else, the touchpad driver on your system might have been uninstalled or rolled back to a much older version, or just replaced with generic touchpad drivers.
Personally, I’m not sure what happened. I haven’t received a Windows update but my touchpad driver was gone.
The fix is to find the right driver for your system and install it. There are two ways to go about this. The first is to use the Device Manager and have it scan for drivers to install. This will work however, you may not get the latest version of the driver which is what happened in my own case. I got a driver that was well over two years old. This is why I recommend using the second solution i.e., manually installing a touchpad driver.
The first thing you need to do is find out which touchpad drivers suit your system. Most systems use Synaptics drivers however, many others use Elan drivers. You can Google which driver your manufacturer recommends for your system. Find the latest version of the driver available. Check to see when it was last updated or which is the latest version number available and install it. Restart your system and the problem should go away.
If it persists, try different drivers e.g., if you went with Synaptics the first time, try Elan even if your manufacturer doesn’t recommend it. This isn’t a hardware issue and it doesn’t appear to be created directly by Windows 10. For whatever reason, the touchpad drivers have stopped working or have been uninstalled so the way to fix it is to find the right drivers and install them on your system.
A similar bug that causes a BSOD when you turn Bluetooth Off also cropped up recently, and the fix again lies with updating and installing the correct driver.
