I have had the GPD Pocket 3 laptop for a year. It's been a great laptop. Can fit in my pocket literally, but would cause my sweat pants to fall right down. There is one problem with it that I have been struggling with for this whole past year and finally, while in a phase where I am typing quite a bit lately, it has started to drive me nuts. Apparently this problem plagues all Pocket 3 users, I looked it up.
If you observe, the touchpad is above the keyboard and to the right. This seems like a great placement for such a small laptop designed to be able to be used with two hands, and it does work quite well that way. But if you type with it, you will quickly discover that every few minutes while typing, the cursor gets clicked somewhere else on your document and without you're noticing until it's too late, you have been typing everything in the wrong place and it's frustrating to find where you were, where it's typing now, and how far back to cut the text to reapply it where it was meant to be typed. And it always chops off a few of the first characters of text when this happens too, so you have to make sure to retype that word that you were typing when it happened. To me, this happens every five minutes.
It's always funny when you take on an assignment to get better at something like troubleshooting, to then need your instructors help because you're stumped, just to have him say, well...troubleshoot it!
I have searched this problem a number of times. I I didn't find the answer any of those times because the option they refer to isn't on my Windows 11 Home edition laptop. This option that is referred to by countless people online is firstly, to just press the function key with the button meant to turn the touchpad off, which the Pocket 3 doesn't have. And then they refer you to an option in Settings > Devices > Touchpad > and look for an option that says "Turn off touchpad when USB mouse is plugged in". Well, it ain't there! I have checked. About twenty times. I keep thinking I must have navigated to the wrong place or something, but there is no selection on my laptop for the touchpad. And the devices menu in Win11 isn't Devices anymore, it's Bluetooth and Devices. So this caused me to do a lot of extra searching just in case every time I looked.
Then I finally found an option online to disable the touchpad in Device management and a couple other places too, where access to managing devices is available. But I didn't see anything for a touchpad in Device Management. I looked at the drivers for a while and checked a video online of how someone else did it, and I finally thought okay, it has to be this HID-Compliant Mouse option under the mouse tree within Device Manager.
I thought, well, if I screw something up, I can always use my USB mouse to try and restore it, and the screen is a touch screen too, so I think I will be okay if I test this. So I right clicked and selected disable device. It disabled. The touchpad was no more. I was satisfied that the main problem is resolved but I would far prefer to keep it enabled and only disable it if I have a mouse plugged in. There will be times when I don't have a mouse.
I looked and looked and looked some more. I found instructions that troubleshooted the problem, said firstly to check to make sure the OS is updated, there may be something that would be fixed by an update. I didn't actually think this would solve it.
I am not exactly a huge advocate of updating fixing everything. People just always turn to that so you have to update to the latest thing regardless of what you want just so that can be eliminated even though I have seldom actually found that to be the solution. In fact, I don't think that has ever been the solution in y case. Yes yes yes, you need to do it for X, Y and Z reasons. Okay I covered myself, now you know the reasons why you should update whenever there's an update available.
seems the only reason everyone insists that you update is because it's the next thing on the list. And people are sooooo sure that will fix it. Just happened with Wells Fargo last week, had a problem with the app and they insisted updating my phone OS would solve it. I told them it would take a few days to make sure everything is backed up to my satisfaction, so the call ended and the next day the problem just went away. I never updated the OS. Seems to me each next update uses more battery life. I don't often find the updates are anything to write home about anyway.
Write home about...unless I'm in a serious relationship with the OS on my phone, I probably shouldn't be writing home about it at all. No wonder why people think I'm weird, they think I'm...yeah anyway.
I turned to Doug after looking through this for a while and he took one look at the menu with Bluetooth and Devices, then through the devices in the list and there was a section for the touch screen and a section for the mouse, and another for the keyboard but not one for the touchpad. He immediately suspected no drivers were installed. We went to Device Manager and he was like yeah, HID-Compliant Mouse, it's not a mouse, it thinks it's a mouse. He then went looking for drivers and asked if I had installed any drivers from GPD. No. It never occurred to e to do such a thing. I've never bought a new laptop before, or a desktop built by a company. Every computer I have used was either twenty years old or I built it myself. Never went to Dell to install drivers for example. I sort of just thought that stuff just comes pre-installed on the device, you know, like bloatware.
"Don't you have any gravy?"
"Where the hell am I gonna get gravy at eight o'clock?"
"I dunno, I though it comes when you cook the meat."
"Comes when you cook the meat. You don't know what you're talking about, Oscar. You just don't know, because you have to MAKE gravy, it doesn't just come when you cook the meat!"
Great movie. Anyway, we found a site for GPD Pocket 3 firmware and it led to a Google Drive with a bunch of zipped files, and Doug was like, man these guys are a small company. I think he asked if I trusted this and I was like, wait, is there any reason I shouldn't?
We downloaded them and I was able to unzip one of them and the other just kept erroring out. That was tge one for the touchpad, which was the one we really wanted. So, I am happy to say that this is now unresolved. Good luck everybody!
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