I have been a Dell fan for quite some time.  We use Dell exclusively at work.  I was really excited about the great deal I got on the Inspiron 1526 notebooks for myself and my wife.  I have used many Dell notebooks before (Inspiron, XPS, Lattitude) and I really liked the feel of the keyboard and the touchpads (in particular) were great. (These are important buying decisions to me)

Well, I am very disappointed in the touchpad performance on the Inspiron 1526s I purchased.  No matter how I configure them, the pads on both computers seem to "miss" a lot of swipes, taps, and so forth, there seems to be a brief (maybe 200ms) lag between swiping and it actually happening on the screen, and the precision and accuracy of getting the pointer where you want it is just awful.  At first I thought it was my imagination, so I went to my boss's XPS and the thing was ROCK solid and felt so smooth and natural.  So I knew it was my laptop.  My wife's does it too, so I doubt it's one bad unit.

I did some research and found that Dell seems to be using Alps touchpads on these (and other newer) laptops instead of the older Synaptics touchpads, which apparently were installed in all the other Dell laptops I've used in the past.  I've also read MANY complaints about the Alps touchpads in general.

I've tried installing Synaptics drivers, but that doesn't work at all on these laptops.  I've also tried different versions (older and newer) Dell/Alps drivers with no success.  Finally, I've even tried just resorting to the built-in windows default driver (which doesn't support scroll regions, etc.), but that's no good either.  Is there ANY solution to get the touchpad to work in a half-way decent fashion?  I'll even gladly void my warranty and "hack" in synaptics hardware, if it's at all possible!  (Doesn't seem to be since the pad is glued to the plastic covering.)

And, no, using a mouse is not an acceptible alternative because I'm rarely near a desk or surface with my laptop.  I'm either on a bed, on the road, on a plane, whatever, but usually not near a flat surface where a mouse would be convenient.

It is upsetting that this one small oversite is completely ruining my experience with these otherwise incredibly awesome laptops.