{"id":1042,"date":"2013-02-16T16:27:02","date_gmt":"2013-02-16T23:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/?p=1042"},"modified":"2013-02-16T16:27:02","modified_gmt":"2013-02-16T23:27:02","slug":"hp-pavilion-touchpad-not-working-you-need-to-kick-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/2013\/02\/hp-pavilion-touchpad-not-working-you-need-to-kick-it\/","title":{"rendered":"HP Pavilion Touchpad Not Working (you need to “kick” it)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, for about two days the touchpad on my HP laptop stopped working.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course it was right after a kernel update in Ubuntu, so I immediately blame that.\u00c2\u00a0 You know… because 9\/10 times it is.<\/p>\n

So, I’m checking and checking things but can’t find anything.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s weird.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not like it’s not working correctly<\/em>, or is misconfigured — it’s like Ubuntu, which is actually pretty good at picking up on hardware changes today, can’t even see it.\u00c2\u00a0 So on a hunch I reboot into Windows, but it’s not working there either.<\/p>\n

So now, instead of having to tromp through the utterly useless Ubuntu forums (full of unresolved issues where people complain about some update or the other breaking something), I can now expand my search to various HP Windows forums. Where in about five minutes, I found this gem.<\/a><\/p>\n

Apparently, on some HP laptops (or maybe all laptop hardware is set up like this, I’d honestly never encountered it before), you have to perform what’s called a “kick”:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Turn off your laptop.<\/li>\n
  2. Unplug your AC adapter.<\/li>\n
  3. Take out your battery. (If you can’t take out your battery externally, time to pull out a screwdriver and start taking your laptop apart.)<\/li>\n
  4. Hold down the power button on your laptop for at least 30 seconds, preferably more (just to make sure, since time is a relative construct perceived differently by all sentient forms of matter).<\/li>\n
  5. Put in your battery, and turn back on.\u00c2\u00a0 Your touchpad should now be visible to your OS, be it Ubuntu or Windows, again.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Why or how this works is anyone’s guess.\u00c2\u00a0 I think it resets the BIOS (it seemed to do a strange double boot the first time plugging it in after performing this procedure, which is similar to what happens on a BIOS upgrade).\u00c2\u00a0 I’m just glad it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    So, for about two days the touchpad on my HP laptop stopped working.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course it was right after a kernel update in Ubuntu, so I immediately blame that.\u00c2\u00a0 You know… because 9\/10 times it is. So, I’m checking and checking things but can’t find anything.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s weird.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not like it’s not working correctly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[78,11,15,31],"tags":[125,126,124,140],"class_list":["post-1042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-linux","category-science-and-technology","category-ubuntu","tag-hp","tag-laptop","tag-touchpad","tag-ubuntu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ZUZG-gO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.threshold-zero.com\/cblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}