I revitalized an Asus PC 901 whose SSDs had gone South, and decided to do it with Mint 12. It works fine, but it needs an external mouse, since the touchpad seems not to be recognized (I did go to the relevant configuration window, but it seems not to have any effect). I don't know if this is a Mint issue, and I'll try Ubuntu (which was the distro running before), but maybe someone knows something about this, Thanks.

Which DE are you using? I installed Linux Mint KDE 12 on a laptop and now the touchpad quits working fairly at random (but mostly when I bring changes to the system). I must note that usually not the whole touchpad stops working, but just one part or more(i.g. the right-click button or tapping). Most times if something of the touchpad stops working the corresponding part of the USB-mouse stops working too, but not always. I experienced the same issues (and worse) when I installed OpenSuSE 12.1 with KDE. The laptop is a Sony Vaio PCG-3C1M.

I installed Mint with the default Gnome desktop. I then tried to add touchpad drivers from the depositories, but that did not help. So I turned the Asus off, went to sleep, the next day worked on my other computers, and when I went back to the Asus the touchpad was working! I guess I jumped the gun on this. Sorry about that. Right now it's running on Cinnamon, and is doing fine.

On the other hand, I am sorry, but only a little surprised by your problems with the Sony - just because I have had occasional aggravations with all sorts of Sony material.

I found many posts on the net referring to issues with the touchpad. Not all mentioned DE's, but when it was mentioned it was KDE. I suppose there is probably some bug in the synaptiks package of KDE that causes this issue, but I can't be sure. The particular laptop was particularly beaten up by Windows Vista (or "Svista" -erase them- as it is often called in Greece) and was given to me by a friend to format and install some Linux version. I tried Linux Mint KDE 12 because the system capabilities can handle KDE and Linux Mint because it is easy for someone inexperienced with Linux. Maybe I should just try the Gnome version of Linux Mint...

After reading this and reading many posts about the same problem on a variety of distros and DEs I must conclude that the issue is related to the linux kernel. Oddly though, I have absolutely no problem with the touchpad on my netbook with Fedora 16 and Gnome DE...