Touchpad scroll dies randomly

I have a Dell Inspiron 15-5547 running Win 8.1. Every now and then the scroll feature (two fingers vertical swipe to scroll the screen), and the two finger tap for right click, will stop working. When this happens, all the other features on the touchpad seem to work. If I restart the laptop it starts working again. I've tried going into services.msc and setting 'Human Interface Devices" to automatic startup, but it doesn't help. There's something else pretty weird also... When I go into the system tray (lower right), right click the touchpad icon, and select Touchpad Properties, it takes me into the Dell Pointing Devices windows. Inside this window, there is a sliding switch to disable the touchpad. When I disable it, the touchpad still works. Weird. Does anybody have any ideas how I can get this sorted out. I'm also using a wireless USB mouse on the same laptop, not sure if that makes a difference. Thanks.

 

To make sure you're getting the latest Dell driver for your particular Dell computer, go to the Dell Support site, enter your Service Tag number or let the site detect your product and go to the Drivers and Downloads section. Look for the touchpad driver.

 

I guess I should have mentioned that the first thing I did was update the driver (from the Dell site using the Service Tag). When I re install it does fix the issue, but after a while it just dies again.

David -- I've never noticed when exactly it dies, I just sort of go to use it and it'll not be working, but I'll start paying closer attention and try and pinpoint it. I can say that the laptop barely ever goes into hibernation though, it only goes to screen saver. I have the power settings configured that way.

 

Yeah I read that one, it doesn't seem like any sort of solution to me though. So you think this is just a straight up poor hardware issue?

 

Three cheers for Dell.