I also forgot to mention in my original post that another inconsistency is the touchpad device showing up in the Hardware and Sound menu in the Control Panel. I've also searched all kinds of forums and while I have found people who have had similar touchpad issues, almost all of those seemed to be resolved by either reinstalling, updating, or uninstalling the driver, all of which I've tried. Which it never is, as it always stops working again within a few days or even hours. And of course, every time I've been like okay, I'll send it in now, it magically starts working again, and I think just maybe this time it's solved for good. I feel like I should be able to fix it without sending it in, since again, it doesn't seem like a hardware issue. Then they said either reinstall the OS (which did work, but since that didn't seem to resolve the issue with any finality I'm hesitant to bother doing it again), and if that didn't work, mail my laptop to the depot so they could fix it. I did contact Dell technical support, and pretty much their only suggestion was to reinstall the driver again, which I did. Look at the Dell message boards and see if others are experiencing the same problem. Have you tried contacting Dell technical support? I'm not trying to avoid helping, I would just hate to offer any suggestions that may cause you to void the warranty. So I don't think it's a hardware problem, but beyond that I have NO idea what the problem and/or solution is. Sometimes it stops right after a Windows update, sometimes not. Sometimes it starts after I do a system restore, sometimes it doesn't. Each time I have eventually gotten it working again after trying a bunch of different things, and so far there isn't a reliable pattern to what makes it stop and start again. Since then, it has stopped again about 5 or 6 times, completely at random, out of nowhere (i.e., not on a restart - just when I'm web browsing, etc). After trying many fixes including uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, updating the driver, uninstalling the driver and letting it reinstall automatically on restart, doing a system restore, I finally had to reinstall the OS, after which it worked. The buttons were the first thing to stop responding, followed shortly (minutes) later by the touchpad itself. About a month ago the Alps multi touchpad stopped working out of nowhere. Two months ago I bought a Dell Latitude e5530 running Windows 7 64-bit.

Mouse not working on dell laptop