I’m thinking of trying to get the touchpads of a few HP notebooks to support multi-touch and gestures, via unofficial solutions of course. Thanks to two of my best buds who volunteered their PC’s, my lab rats at the moment are a HP Pavilion dv2 running Windows 7 and HP Compaq 6510b running Windows Vista, which use ALPS and Synaptics touchpads respectively. Today I downloaded an unofficial driver modified to give certain Acer (gasp!) models multi-touch, but the app author said it should work on any Vista computer… so I tried installing it on the 6510b and it works, sort of – Pointer momentum worked 100%, multi-touch two-finger scrolling worked for a few minutes but suddenly stopped (for unknown reasons) and since then, I couldn’t get two finger scrolling to work again. Pinching and chiral scrolling didn’t work at all.
I figure that the Pavilion dv2 MAY have a better chance at working since its rather big touchpad fitted into its slim profile hints at it being ‘new hardware’ (hopefully multi-touch and gesture enabled?) but I need to find and try more drivers first. I’ll post results of my findings as we go along.
After extensive searches for a working driver for the HP Pavilion dv2 running Windows 7, 64-bit, I’ve finally found it! This driver from HP (for Windows Vista and Windows 7, 32 and 64 bit) allows the dv2′s ProtectSmart hard disk protection feature to work properly. I’ve downloaded many, many, many ProtectSmart and 3D Drive Guard drivers from HP, including the one from the Pavilion dv2′s “Windows Vista drivers” page… but none seem to work with a HP Pavilion dv2 running Windows 7 (not HP’s fault, since Windows 7 hasn’t even gone mainstream yet!). All of them indicate “Active” status when installed, though when you lift the notebook up or suddenly ‘drop’ it to the ground (holding it with your hands and not actually hitting the floor of course), the hard disk continues to run and the ‘red light’ indicator doesn’t come on. Yet this one specific driver above appears to be the only one that works at the moment! Yay.
So if you’re a HP Pavilion dv2 owner and planning to/already installed Windows 7 on your notebook, hit that download link for a copy of the driver that actually works on your notebook/OS combo!
Besides being a little busy over the past week because the site’s servers got overloaded (apparently, as my host claims) and went down for a couple of days, I’ve got some good news to share here – I just received news that a HP Mini 5101 is likely to land at my doorstep in the coming week. The Mini 5101 sounds like the ULTIMATE netbook at the moment and I’m definitely looking forward to checking it out (I’ll post pictures of it here too on the HP Fansite!). The first and foremost thing I’m gonna do when I receive it is tear out XP and plop Windows 7 RTM Ultimate on it – my experience with Windows 7 64-bit on the HP Pavilion dv2 has been superb and nowadays, I just wished all PC’s used Seven!
Windows 7 Quick Scan is super-fast even on a HP Pavilion dv2!
Updated with a screenshot from the Pavilion dv2′s Windows Action Center/Windows Defender
Me and a friend have been testing the HP Pavilion dv2 ultra-portable notebook PC (featuring AMD’s Athlon Neo single-core processor and 512 MB of ATI graphics) for several weeks now and honestly, it rocks. Despite having an anemic-sounding 1.6 GHz processor, this thing runs like a champ. HP dv2: A typical Windows Defender scan of its 250 GB hard disk on Windows 7 takes about two minutes! In contrast, my HP Mini running Windows Vista with a 160 GB disk takes 30 to 40 minutes for Windows Defender to do an equivalent scan.
And let’s not even get started on how the Pavilion dv2 can run modern games (like Left4Dead and Call of Duty 5) on 1280 x 800 resolution (albeit at low settings, but extremely smooth frame rates)… I’ll talk about that in a few days’ time once I get some benchmark numbers.
I’ve been running AVG Free alongside the built-in Windows firewall for Vista (and recently, Windows 7) since 2007 and my system is always clean. Yup, Windows is quite secure as long as you’re visiting ‘good’ websites!
