touchpad and track pointer frozen

When was the last time your touchpad was working? I think there maybe some driver conlict(s). If WINDOWS doesn't recognize the driver(s) after you reintalled it, you can try system restore.

I'm having a very similar problem with my Gen1 Inspiron XPS.

Everything was working fine yesterday (when I was, ironically, helping fix my friend's laptop). There was one random crash that occured while I was browsing music on winamp, but that's the only thing out of the ordinary that happened to my laptop yesterday.

Anyhow, I noticed today, just an hour or two ago that neither the touchpad nor stick were working. Additionally, about every ~3 seconds my computer would do a minor 'hiccup' and the mouse pointer would hang (I am/was using my BT Microsoft mouse) and winamp would pause momentarily.

I rebooted and upon restart noted that my keyboard was only registering every about 3rd keystroke. I was terrified something was horribly wrong with my hardware or something. I logged in (with great difficulty) and proceeded to uninstall the Alps touchpad drivers (which, upon me opening it up, did not acknowledge that I had either a touchpad or stick at all!). The hiccuping didn't seem to start until after I had originally opened up Alps to see if I could figure out why my integral pointing devices weren't working. I thought somehow Alps could be the culprit in my keyboard issues too.

I reboot again, sans Alps, and I have the exact same issue with the keyboard upon login. Windows detects the touchpad etc as a "P/S 2 compatible mouse" which is all well and good, except that neither are responding at all!

I try to reinstall using the download I already have of the latest Alps drivers (R113813), but there was some DLL it couldn't open, so I re-extract the drivers from the download I had, and then install seems to happen fine. I reboot, as requested.

Still have the keyboard issue and Alps now recognizes that my XPS has a touchpad (allowing me to choose to enable/disable the pad and it's buttons) but there's still no response at all with either pointing device, and Alps doesn't detect the stick at all.

I reboot into Safe Mode and the keyboard is all back to normal, no problems there. I uninstall the alps drivers and reboot into safe mode again, still no touchpad/stick. I roll back the drivers back to what I think are the default MS ones, and still no luck. I reboot normally and go and re-download the Alps drivers from the dell site and install them. I reboot and here I am. My keyboard is working fine ::knock on wood:: and the hiccup is gone. However, I still have no response from either built-in pointer and the Alps utility/MS Intellipoint still doesn't recognize that I have either. Next step for me will be to uninstall MS Intellipoint and reinstall the latest version there, and see if that helps.

Summary: Yea, my internal pointers (pad and stick) don't work either on my Inspiron Gen1 XPS

Please let me know if anyone figures out a cause!

(I'm running a non-dell branded version of WinXP Pro.)

Update:

I was previously running Intellipoint 5.2, I'm now running 5.5, no notable difference.

I believe the problem lies with the Alps drivers; when they're uninstalled the rest of my computer works fine, just not the touchpad/stick.

I have just now found the manual showing how to remove the keyboard, I will do that shortly and ensure that the connection for that and the trackpad are all seated correctly.

Update^2:

Everything's working great now!

I'm not sure exactly what I did that fixed thigns, but I pulled out the keyboard, reseated that connector along with the one for the touchpad (the pointing stick shares a connector with the keyboard) and then I rebooted (after cleaning out huge amounts of dust) and things seem to be going well; I installed Alps with no problem and I've re-configured the pad how I like it (enable scrolling but just real-narrow).

Just a note: DO NOT attempt to take apart your laptop unless you are confident in yourself and have some experience; there's a lot of delicate components and cables involved and there's a lot of damage to be done if you aren't careful!