brief summary of my process for fixing an unresponsive Asus Dialpad (tldr reinstall driver)

1. Inside BIOS, disable touchpad under internal pointer device
2. In windows' Device Manager, select view -> "drivers by type" and "show hidden devices"
3. Under human interface devices, uninstall all instances of asusdialpadfilter.inf
4. In the same section, right click on hidi2c.inf and install it
   1. If it says it can’t install because a better driver exists, restart computer. Sometimes it hasn't updated yet and still thinks asusdialpadfilter.inf exists
   2. If still doesn't work, run Driver Store Explorer (aka RAPR from https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer) and uninstall all asusdialpadfilter.inf under human interface devices, then restart
5. If mtconfig.inf is missing, open cmd as admin and enter sc config MTConfig start=demand
6. Install asusdialpadfilter.inf driver and restart

Important:

I find that you can avoid a lot of update-related issues by running apt install inside a virtual TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F3 (or F4, F5, etc..) instead of the normal graphical desktop. This would hopefully prevent a black screen since there is no active display server to crash. See below if you still get a black screen

This guide is for systems using systemd

First of all, do not immediately reboot/shutdown the machine. It's possible that an update (especially for GPU drivers) caused the display server to crash, but the update is still running in the background.

You can try switching TTY's with Ctrl+Alt+F# with any function key from F3-F6 (might also be worth trying the full range from F1-F9) and see if anything happens. If it's completely unresponsive, wait at least 5 minutes before restarting in case the update is somehow still running or even longer to be safe (may be the reason I'm writing this). On a go

This guide uses windows 11 and popOS 22.04, but windows 10 and other popOS versions should also work. We assume that you already know how to install windows and flash popOS on a USB; this guide mainly covers the popOS and dual boot configuration parts.

Much of this guide is adapted from these two: https://ostechnix.com/dual-boot-windows-and-pop-os/ https://blog.stefandroid.com/2023/02/04/encrypted-disk-pop-os-install.html

Recommended to boot into a USB with windows ISO pre-installed, use windows' media creation tool for flashing the USB