Electro-hydraulic actuators are difficult to control accurately because of fast pressure dynamics, valve dead-zone nonlinearity, parameter variations, external disturbances, and input saturation. This study develops an adaptive event-triggered backstepping controller that integrates a disturbance observer and anti-windup compensation within a unified Lyapunov-based framework. The adaptive laws account for uncertain plant parameters and valve-gain variation, while the dead-zone residual is treated as a bounded uncertainty. A strictly positive triggering threshold excludes Zeno behavior under the stated assumptions, and the anti-windup modification preserves uniform ultimate boundedness in the presence of input saturation. The method is assessed through MATLAB/Simulink–Simcenter Amesim co-simulation using six reference trajectories and is compared with Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID), sliding-mode control, and online self-tuning fuzzy PID control. Across the investigated cases, the proposed controller achieved the lowest RMSE and ARE values; for example, the RMSE was 0.000837 m for the first multi-step test and 0.003778 m for the chirp test. These findings demonstrate improved tracking under the tested co-simulation conditions. Quantitative triggering statistics, observer-error analysis, and saturation behavior are addressed in the revised evaluation, with real-time experimental validation identified as an essential step toward hardware implementation.