Acer T230H monitor touchscreen stops responding after a few minutes in Windows 10: a workaround
I was lucky enough to come across an Acer T230H touchscreen monitor during a liquidation. It needed a new LCD kit because the backlight was out. I ended up spending $50 on the monitor and $50 on a replacement LCD kit, and now the thing works.
There is one problem, however. The touchscreen times out every 5-10 minutes regardless of usage, and then no longer works. It needs to be disabled/enabled in Device Manager before it starts working again. The same can be accomplished by unplugging the USB cable and plugging it in again.
That is not an ideal solution. I tried setting the monitor's USB Input Device to not allow the computer to power it off to save power. That had no effect.
Control Panel -> Devices and Printers -> T230H -> Hardware tab -> USB Input Device -> Change settings -> Power Management
Instead, I downloaded devcon.exe using one of the methods here, created a batch file to disable and re-enable the USB Input Device associated with the touchscreen's vendor ID, and set up a task in Task Scheduler to run that file every 5 minutes.
Devcon is capable of many things, but in this case, all I wanted to be able to do is disable/enable hardware from the command line.
This is definitely not a "fix," but it is a solution that works nicely.
Here are the steps:
1. Download devcon.exe using one of these methods
2. Create a folder somewhere and put devcon.exe in it. We will be creating a batch file in this folder.
3. Right-click on the background of this folder, hover over New, and select Text Document.
4. Give the file a name, such as t230htouchscreen.bat. Make sure to remove the .txt from the end of the name.
5. Right-click on the file and choose Edit.
6. The file is now open in Notepad or some other editor. Paste the content below into the editor, change path-to-devcon to match your actual path to devcon.exe, and then save the file. The touchscreen's hardware ID can be found in the device's properties window on the Details tab.
t230htouchscreen.bat contents:
"c:\path-to-devcon\devcon.exe" disable "USB\VID_0408&PID_3001"
timeout /t 3
"c:\path-to-devcon\devcon\devcon.exe" enable "USB\VID_0408&PID_3001"7. Now open Task Scheduler by clicking on the Windows logo/Start menu and starting to type "task" into the search box. You should see Task Scheduler as an option. Click on it.
8. The Task Scheduler opens. Click on "Create Task" in the right pane (NOT "Create Basic Task").
9. A window will open. Fill out the details similar to what is below. You can be creative with the name and description, but it would help for it to be accurate for clarity in case you or someone else wants to come back to this in the future. The title and description that I used is below.
Refresh Acer T230H touchscreen
Disables and enables the USB Input Device for the Acer T230H touchscreen since it times out due to inactivity and disables the touchscreen even though it appears as enabled in Device Manager, and can only be reactivated by disabling/enabling the device
A few items of major importance are on the General tab.
Make sure "Run whether user is logged in or not" is selected, and that "Do not store password" is unchecked. Otherwise, you will have to put in the password every time.
Make sure that "Run with highest privileges" is checked.
Make sure that the "Configure for" dropdown is set to Windows 10.
10. On the Triggers tab, enter the options similar to what is below. The reason that I chose "one time" in addition to "on workstation unlock" and "at startup" is so that the task will run immediately and repeat indefinitely in the current session. Alternatively, you could restart the computer. I found that locking/unlocking had no effect on the task until after I restarted. The bottom post on this page seemed to help.
I had to set the trigger for the scheduled task to "One time", then set the "Repeat task every" to get the frequency I required.
MattStephenson
For "one time," I set the date and time to be one minute in the future, and then saved the task.
11. On the Actions tab, I added a new action that starts a program, and chose the batch file that we created in Step 6.
12. On the Settings tab, select only "Allow task to be run on demand," "Stop task if it runs longer than (1 hour)," and "If the running task does not end when requested, force it to stop." These are probably unnecessary, but it's better to be safe than to have some batch file running forever because of something stupid.
13. Click OK. You will probably be prompted to enter your password. After that, the task is saved and will start running at the time that you set, and then repeat at the interval that you selected.
Note that when you go to make changes to the task, when you click OK, you might get the error below.
An error has occurred for task Refresh Acer T230H touchscreen. Error message: The specified account name is not valid.
To fix this, click on the Change User or Group... button. In the window that pops up, start typing your username, and then click the Check Names button. Your whole username should then appear. If not, check the spelling of your username and try again. After it appears, click OK.
Click OK on the task properties window. Enter your password if prompted, and click OK. Your task is now saved. You will have to do this every time you try to make changes to the task.
That's it!
Your touchscreen will deactivate/activate every 5 minutes or whatever interval you chose, and will continue to work.
If I ever find an actual fix, I'll update this post.
If you encounter issues, please leave a comment!
Here is a list of all of the resources I used while diagnosing and troubleshooting this issue:
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