[Article] Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet touchscreen issue elevated!

Remember me mentioning in my review (and here) that my tablet had a problem with the touch screen where it would stop accepting any touch inputs after resuming from sleep? I told this to the Dell support personnel over Twitter and their final response was to uninstall the touch screen driver and reinstall it. I had no idea how to do it, but for some word reason, the issue went away for few days without me doing anything. (These devices have ears!)

Well, yesterday it came back and this time it was not a random issue anymore. The touchscreen completely sopped working. Not just after waking up from sleep, but even after a reboot too. That's never happened before.

 

There wasn't much I could do from my end other than to use Factory Reset. First I tried using Windows 8's Refresh feature. For some weird reason, it asked me to enter the installation media!!! That shouldn't happen, as it should be using the source files stored in the Recovery partition. (I have done this before and every time I didn’t have to insert any installation media) Having one USB port is not enough btw. Now that the touch screen was not working, I had to have the mouse plugged to the USB port. So I cannot plug in a USB drive. I could redirect the Refresh source to a custom location as per instructions given here, but that would completely break the default recovery functionality. That's not a good thing in my book.

 

[Article] Unresponsive display after waking up Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet

Since the A03 firmware update, a new problem seems to have come up with the tablet. When you wake up the tablet from sleep, the screen becomes completely unresponsive to the touch. The only way to get it back to work is to press and hold the power button to power down the tablet and press it again to power up the tablet. It is the same thing as pressing the reset button on a PC.

Now, I don't think the firmware is the culprit here. It most likely are the drivers that were released alongside the firmware. The issue is, we have to install these new drivers with the new firmware. That is specifically mentioned in the release notes. (This also applies to A04 update which I mentioned here.)

 

At first I thought it was an issue with Windows 8.1 Preview that I have been running for a couple of weeks. But when I refreshed the tablet and went back to the fresh Windows installation, the situation didn't change. It would randomly lose the touch support when it wakes up from sleep.

 

 

I talked with Dell Support personnel via Twitter. They told me to calibrate the display first but it didn't make the situation any better because it wasn't a calibration problem. Then they told me to refresh the tablet and see. When I told them that I had already done that, they told me to do a full recovery from the backup. I told them that I don't feel like going through with it.