In making my rounds this morning, I found the touchpad driver MIA on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (8th-Gen i7 CPU, c. 2018). On a machine of this august vintage, that could mean only one thing. Its driver must have gotten corrupted or gone sideways. That’s how I found myself going old school: X1 Extreme driver repair became my mission. Let me tell you what I did, and how I fixed that problem.
Going Old School: X1 Extreme Driver Repair Manuevers
No cursor from the touchpad meant some kind of driver issue, if not device failure. Hoping for the former, and dreading the latter, I started down the troubleshooting trail, as follows:
1. Reboot the PC. On a new boot-up and login, keyboard works fine but still no cursor. Still no touchpad cursor, so I plug a wired mouse into the USB-A port to shoot more trouble.
2. Inside Device Manager, I find the touchpad driver as a Synaptics item under “Mice and other pointing devices.” I try reloading same via Driver > Update Driver > Browse my computer for drivers, then take what I’ve got from the “Let me pick from a list of available drivers…” branch. Reboot again: still no touchpad cursor.
3. Visit the Lenovo Driver Support page, grab the latest Synaptics Touchpad driver, and install same. Reboot PC again. Voila! Touchpad cursor appears and is working properly. Problem solved…
Final diagnosis: the on-disk touchpad driver had gotten corrupted. Downloading and installing a new one got the touchpad working again. Good-oh!
What’s (or Would Have Been) Next?
If the driver replacement hadn’t done the trick, my next move would have been to visit Settings > System > Recovery, there to hit the Reinstall now button to perform an in-place upgrade repair install. Note: this replaces all drivers as part and parcel of rebuilding the running OS image.
Had that failed, it’s pretty likely I would have had to decide if I wanted to fork over the money for a new touchpad and get it repaired, or attempt those repairs myself. I’m glad things didn’t go that far. Replacing a driver costs only time and effort, but no money. Touchpads aren’t free (Copilot says replacement cost is US$50-70, and if I had to take it to a shop that would add at least another US$100 or so). Again: glad no such repairs were needed. Case closed on a high note: it’s a good day in Windows-World.
