Decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Windows 11. First I did it as an upgrade to make sure there were no issues and made a backup to fall back to.
Then went for a full clean install. The only significant problem I encountered was that at no time during the clean install was there a mouse cursor appearing or trackpad support. I had to do everything using the tab and arrow keys. Even at the first boot to Windows 11 the trackpad did nothing until I installed the Windows 11 driver pack and suddenly the cursor appeared.
Is that normal?
EDIT: By the way, PS2 mouse emulation is on Auto in the BIOS.
Also by the way, there is similarly no mouse cursor or trackpad support when in the BIOS. Is that normal?
Seems so. But, speaking as a non-techie, I don’t see why it’s so difficult to make it so that you can use the trackpad without the OS being fully loaded. My Dells have been doing that for at least the last four years and with my last one I could even use my Bluetooth connected Logitech MX Ergo trackball while in the BIOS.
@Kieran_Levin@nrp Can’t something be done about this? I find it really frustrating. It causes the same problems with my other software that uses Windows RE etc like Macrium Reflect and MiniTool Partition Wizard.
There is a lot of software that works pre-OS. Using the trackpad is what ‘normal’ people are accustomed to. Many won’t even have experience of using the Tab and arrow keys to negotiate the BIOS etc. And if they want eg to limit battery charging or use software that works pre-OS, they will have to know how to negotiate navigation.
Other brands have been doing this for years. Framework should be leading the field, rather than using last-decade, or even last-century, methods. This laptop is not just for computer geeks.
Let me see what is going on here. Tigerlake requires the Tigerlake SerialIO i2c driver to be loaded to support i2c to the trackpad. And on windows 10 this is not included in images from MSFT. If the bios is set to touchpad PS2 emulation=Auto we should detect the lack of i2c traffic and fallback to ps2 backup mode where the touchpad is handled by the EC using ps2 emulation.
Windows 11 may be trying to do something where it is polling the trackpad but not functional for some reason, so we never enter the fallback mode.
FWIW there are two distinct reports in this thread – one is a bug report that the trackpad doesn’t work in Windows on a clean install, and the other a feature request that the UEFI setup forms support the mouse. I suspect that the second one is more difficult overall given InsydeH2O may not be equipped for it.