Comment by 10x-dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 10x-dev | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit confused. Last week I bought a 12th gen Intel ThinkPad that came with Win11. Everything works just fine, including the touchpad. For the touchpad specifically, there is also some 'enhancer' utility that comes preinstalled. I assume that if I had to reinstall Windows (I believe there should be a partition for this purpose) it would put the laptop in the same state it is in now, so I'm not really following what the author is saying. In the worst case, won't Windows Update download the driver from Microsoft?

Is the author saying that some drivers are not included on the DVD image, or that there are drivers that Microsoft isn't making available at all, even via windows update?

To download the driver you need a network connection. To have a working network connection you need working device drivers for your network devices and maybe your motherboard. In your case Lenovo did this.for you (installed the drivers). If you do not have instalation media and drivers i would advise to be very careful when reinstalling windows.

The issue is that on a vanilla ISO the touchpad is dead. You can't use it at all, as in the pointer won't move on the screen. Which makes it a pain to install and especially to connect to a wireless network, because these computers don't usually have network ports anymore.

I've been dealing with missing drivers since Windows 3.11. In the case you're describing, I'd connect a USB mouse, or just 'tab' my way through setup.

Sure, there are workarounds, but this is pretty basic functionality, we're not talking about perfect acceleration curves or exotic devices. Hell, I'm pretty sure windows 3.11 didn't need specific drivers for moving my mouse around.

And Linux somehow found a way to get it working out of the box. And I'm not talking Ubuntu or Pop OS, but Arch Linux, which comes with ~nothing installed. I just started i3 on top of xorg, and I had a working touchpad. Sure, the movement was shoddy until I configured it, but it was serviceable.

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