Dell Latitude E6400 TouchPad Driver Workaround Fix For Windows 10

Author:
phil
Created:
Friday, August 16th, 2019
Last Updated:
Wednesday, September 21st, 2022

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I recently had the "fun" of working on a Dell Latitude E6400 and getting Windows 10 installed on it. Surprisingly, that computer for its age, doesn't do half bad on Windows 10 once you throw a decent SSD into it.

One thing I noticed from the get-go, was that the touchpad was extremely wonky, even during the Windows PE or Windows 10 installation environment. I simply installed an external mouse to get past the problem of installation and figured I would see how it did once fully booted into Windows.

Even in Windows 10, I had wonky issues. It would hang, the left click would actually be the right click but the right click wouldn't do anything, neither button would work, right click did nothing but left click worked fine, you name it not to mention the pointer was painfully slow to move around the screen....

At first, I was going to just leave the wonky nature and chalked it up-to a hardware problem. Later though, after deciding to offload the computer, I figured it wasn't very nice of me to sell a laptop with a wonky touchpad, so I dove into it further.

Google didn't really help much in the way of figuring out how to fix the touchpad for the E6400 on Windows 10 but I did manage to run across a post where someone had the same symptoms I was having and mentioned installing Linux to test the hardware. He said the hardware was fine so that pointed to a driver issue. I decided to dig into drivers a bit to see what I could muster up.

At first, I went to the windows catalog update where all drivers are available. I've had luck finding drivers there that would make the touchpad work but I still had problems. I gave up on the windows catalog path and instead opted for an official Dell driver for the Dell Latitude D6410 instead because it has the necessary software to disable the PointStick which turns out to be the problem.

What I figured out was that various drivers would make the touchpad work the way it was supposed to but as soon as you hit one of the pointstick buttons, the touchpad would completely freeze up and quit working. That got me thinking that "if" one of the software packages was able to disable the pointstick buttons, then maybe the touchpad would work just fine.

After way too much time playing around, I finally found a software driver package I was happy with enough to call it good and that was the Windows 7 x64 Input drivers for the Latitude E6410 which will work just fine on the Dell Latitude E6400.

One thing I did notice with this is that the touchpad wasn't as accurate as what it would be with better drivers, but it works well enough to not complain too much. I still recommend that you use an external mouse but in a pinch or for casual usage, the following steps will get you going.

The Steps

1) Download Input driver for Dell Latitude E6410 from: https://downloads.dell.com/input/DRVR_WIN_R310070.EXE
If the link is broken, do a search on the file name: DRVR_WIN_R310070.EXE

2) Install the driver package & reboot
If the installer doesn't work, do a manual update of the driver from Device Manager on the PS/2 Compatible mouse. When updating the driver, choose "Let me pick the driver" and point to the folder where the driver package has been extracted. (you can use 7-zip to extract the package if you need to)

3) Go to the Windows 10 Mouse Settings (Search -> "Mouse" -> Click Mouse Settings

4) On the Mouse Settings page, Click "Additional Mouse Options"

5) The first tab should be the Dell DuoPoint tab (or whatever it was called). At the bottom, Click "Click to change Dell Touchpad settings"

6) On the Touchpad Sensitivity tab, lower "Touch Pressure". I found this helps the responsiveness of the touchpad

7) Save the settings

8) Click the Pointer Stick icon (middle icon; blue button surrounded by keyboard)

9) On the Sensitivity Tab, Disable the Pointstick

10) Click the Buttons Tab and Disable the Pointstick Buttons

11) Save the settings

12) Test the touchpad and pointstick buttons and done!

I ran into a problem where the touchpad quit working after testing, so I reboot the computer. After the reboot, I didn't have any more problems what-so-ever so keep that in mind that a reboot might be necessary

Hope that helps you get the touchpad working on your Dell Latitude E6400 running Windows 10!

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Submitted by Stanley (not verified) on Thu, 2024/04/04 - 04:56

My touchpad doesn't work at all, I have tried a lot of ideas I found on google and still nothing. I tried your method as well but it didn't work. I think I will just go back to windows 7.

Submitted by Joseph Krug (not verified) on Fri, 2023/04/14 - 17:04

Similar \ different issue with E6400 Touchpad: On battery only, the touchpad is fine; but, on AC the touchpad is slow/erratic/useless. Never in 25 years of laptop experience, have I seen such an unusual symptom ! Any thoughts? (I have sought an updated driver from Dell, , but Dell says "NADA for Win 10" !! ) Tried the Win7 64-bit driver, but Win 10 rejected it !

Submitted by phil on Tue, 2023/05/09 - 16:53

Did you try disabling the pointer stick? Outside of that, being creative in finding different drivers is the only other suggestion I have. That or call it quits and find a newer laptop ;-)

Submitted by Restart (not verified) on Tue, 2022/06/07 - 04:26

Tried a lot of ways and watching videos for a year and gave up. Today decided to try again and luckily I found you. Thank you so much.

Submitted by Chris R (not verified) on Tue, 2022/04/05 - 21:02

I just had a customer who was very partial to his latitude that wanted it upgraded to a SSD and Windows 10. It had the same problem after the upgrade. Google brought me to this and it worked perfectly. Thanks for sharing your insight and saving me hours!

Submitted by phil on Wed, 2022/04/06 - 14:49

Glad it helped out! I can tell you I spent way longer on this fix than I want to admit, but it was satisfying to figure out a stable approach.

Submitted by NOORDIN (not verified) on Sun, 2021/04/04 - 13:03

Thank You very much

Submitted by Carlos (not verified) on Fri, 2020/12/04 - 14:22

This worked like a charm for a long standing problem with my laptop. Thank you so much!

Submitted by Larry V (not verified) on Tue, 2020/07/07 - 12:56

Nice, however how did you get bluetooth, broadcom USH, PCI Serial Port and PCI Simple Communications Controller working? If you have the drivers, I'll create a link for other people who have this computer and need the drivers.

Submitted by phil on Tue, 2020/07/14 - 15:01

@Larry V,

I don't remember needing to do anything special to get those drivers working. Windows 10 detected them and installed the appropriate drivers. I can only assume they worked because I didn't specifically test any of them outside of the wireless (which worked fine).

You might try having windows try to update the drivers and see if there's any luck on that front. Otherwise, look at using the Windows 7 drivers which will usually work just fine.

Submitted by T. (not verified) on Thu, 2020/04/30 - 05:54

Thanks a lot, have been trying to get the touchpad to work properly for ages and your workaround saved the day :)

Submitted by Mike (not verified) on Fri, 2020/03/13 - 17:00

Cool! Thanks a lot!

Submitted by Andrew Davis (not verified) on Sat, 2019/09/28 - 14:51

Fantastic! I've worked with a lot of laptops but the throweverythingatittouchpad design insanity on this one was just a bad idea from the start...
Thank you for saving me all that time. I was just gonna throw it away.

Submitted by phil on Wed, 2019/10/02 - 23:08

Glad to help! I spent way more time on it than I should have, but I was happy it was running in the end. I've run into using older drivers on newer windows and they tend to work just fine. This one just took a little more thinking out of the box.