So I’ve installed Windows 7 on my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop, and now the scroll function on my touchpad doesn’t work anymore. YAAAAY! FUN!!! YIPPEEEEEEE! All attempts to download the necessary driver from Dell’s evil, shitty, incompetently-designed and utterly unhelpful website have been failures. First of all, everything on their Support page takes 100 years to load, even though I’m plugged into a fast internet connection and everything else on the internet loads normally. Here is the Dell driver download page. Under “Input Device Drivers” is the touchpad driver I need to download. I click the big, blue Download button. You’d think this would be nice and simple, but nope - yippee! More fun! Instead, it does absolutely nothing for about four minutes, and then I get an error page.
Well, I downloaded the right driver, finally - from this super-fun, third-party, shady-looking site (thank God it turned out to actually be the right driver and not malware.) It restored the touchpad scroll, as I had hoped.
This has been yet another in the very long line of problems I’ve had with Dell’s technical support. I’ve owned Dells in some form or another for about 7 years now, and I can safely say my current laptop will be my last Dell. I have found their customer support to be absolutely atrocious. Do not buy a Dell.
We have buildings full of them. They work great. Just yesterday i had to download a bunch of drivers. The site was accurate & simple to use. They did download a bit slowly, but otherwiise no complaint. YMMV.
Dell’s site is very easy to find drivers – you just need the service code. Once you enter that, it will take you to the correct drivers.
You need that number, though. I recently needed drivers for two computers, both the same model and both bought at the same time and arriving in the same shipment. They had different drivers. But I just typed in the code (usually on a sticker on the back of the desktop or the bottom of the laptop) it found them fine.
They also have a little applet that will find the code for you.
That download worked fine for me, tho I chose “download with browser” and it turned out to actually be an ftp download rather than an http one. A browser will usually handle a simple ftp download but it’s possible that you have some firewall blocking the ftp protocol.