Do you mean mouse pad, as in the surface on which you move your mouse around, or do you mean the track pad, the little area usually below your laptop's keyboard which emulates a mouse?

If you do mean your track pad, then it could be a driver issue.

A keyboard shortcut for zooming would be nice though in the event that the user doesn't have a scroll wheel. Other games implement this through either holding down both the left and right mouse buttons while moving forward or back or by using the plus and minus keys.

The shortcut keys for zooming are z,x,c as of when I checked last, and I noticed that when I used the side of the pad to zoom, the cursor changed like it was scrolling, but Sins wasn't recognizing it, so I think that, at least for me, it's an issue with Sins, since it works with full-screen apps (Medieval 2, for example). Also, a friend of mine has complained about the same thing, and the same cursor thing happens, so I think that the way mine works is pretty widespread. I have a Toshiba and he has an HP (with a broken power cable, so I'm posting for him too), so I think that most laptops are giving the input but Sins isn't accepting it.

If it works the same way as mine, there's a special resident utility that has to be loaded in order to interpret movement on the edge of the touchpad as scrolling. I've had other instances where it didnt work perfectly, so I'm betting it is translating the input in some non-standard way (i.e., it's not actually emulating the same input as it'd get from a real scroll wheel, but doing it some other way).



Common problem, it seems--HP uses flimsy power jacks (mine's broken as well). Unfortunately it's the jack itself on the motherboard that breaks, not the adapter, so make sure he looks into that... unless you want to tear the machine down to solder a new one on yourself (new jack's only a few dollars), it's very expensive to fix. I just use a dock cable to power mine (just leave it on the desk for a second monitor via Multiplicity), since the battery's shot too.