Laptop troubleshooting forum: Gateway Laptop NV55S Keyboard and Touchpad Issues

Hi Guys,

I am fairly new to forums like this so stay with me and my kindergarten-like questions and explanations.

So I have a Gateway Latop NV55S, great machine in general, I dropped it (definitely not the first time) and broke the Harddrive. replaced that, clean installed windows 7 on it, all good and dandy, ALMOST.

I have still been having issues with my keyboard and touchpad. Let's start with the touchpad. I after my clean install I got all the drivers from the Gateway support side for my machines, installed everything and its working fine. Unfortunately for the touchpad, even after installing the synaptics driver, the little animated Icon on the right bottom side by the clock, is supposed (and used to) indicate with a green light, where I was touching the touch pad. While I can still move the mouse and click buttons the animator isn't showing anything. Furthermore I am not able to scroll at all. Now everyone says just go into mouse setting and under the synaptics settings Ill be able to active scrolling, well that function isn't there for me. All I can see is Overview, and Buttons. It seems to think it's a standard mouse, not a "special" one.
While this doesn't seem like a major problem its very inconvenient, especially since i used to be able to scroll and now it just won't work....

The next issue I have is a little bit more annoying. Every time my laptop sleeps, either lid down or just idle for long periods of times, my keyboard stops working. I bring the laptop "back to life" for a lack of better term, but my keyboard isn't doing anything. It usually requires me a couple power off power on restarts and I often even have to do the Reset (unplug everything, remove cable and battery and hold power button down) before it works again....

So my question is whether I could have dinged the connectors to the Keyboard and the touchpad as well when the HDD broke or whether I am missing something?

Like I said before, I downloaded all the server, the synaptics one multiple times since the one on the synaptics website seems to be newer. Neither one fixes it. I looked up to see if I have the other driver listed under touchpad on the gatway support site, but nope, I am supposed to have this one.

Just for a quick overview again for the latop I have:
Gateway NV55S
Windows 7 64bit Clean Install
Processor: AMD A6-3400M APU
RAM 4GB (3.48 GB USABLE)
Pen and Touch: No Pen or Touch Input available for this Display

Thank you in advance for your help.