HP Fansite

In search of multi-touch for HP trackpads

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.

Windows 7 + AMD Athlon Neo = Win!

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!