Cursor jumping

Cardew

My son has bought a new Dell laptop and is having a problem with the cursor ‘jumping about’ and the typing appearing in the middle of previously typed words.

e.g. He could be typing ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cat’ and it would appear as ‘ the quijumped over ck brown fox the lazy cat’

Or at times the cursor will move down two lines.

It does this on all typing – MS Office 2007(genuine copy) –emails – Google search etc.
Dell will no doubt take back the laptop for repair and/or get him to reload windows, but does anyone have any idea of the fault please?

scottishminnie

I sympathise - my work laptop has this very fault. The fault is with the mouse pad.
The IT guys said the keyboard part would have to be replaced and since I can't afford to be without it for 2 days my solution is a separate mouse and a post it note over the mouse area.

It's not ideal but it does work!

espresso

Try changing the touchpad sensitivity - you may have an icon in the system tray or check in control panel.

fwor

scottishminnie wrote: »

my solution is a separate mouse and a post it note over the mouse area.

All of the Dell laptops that I've used have an option in the BIOS setup pages to switch off the built-in touchpad at the hardware level, which would remove the need for a post-it note.

penrhyn

Never liked touch pads, much preferred the nipples fitted to earlier Dells.
I'd recommend trying a mouse. At least if the problem goes away you will know what was causing it.
Use one of these with my clunky Netbook.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Compact-Optical-Mouse-500/dp/B0007OELTK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1332863271&sr=8-4

scottishminnie

fwor wrote: »

All of the Dell laptops that I've used have an option in the BIOS setup pages to switch off the built-in touchpad at the hardware level, which would remove the need for a post-it note.

It's a Dell so probably has this but all "normal" user control functionality is disabled in case we do something outrageous like changing the screen resolution.
There's no danger of IT switching it off without me having a note from god anyway so I'll persevere with my post it note!

WhiteChristmas

Even with a locked-down machine, it's worth looking to see if they've left you a "Dell Touchpad" icon in the task bar at the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

If so, right-click and select properties then "touchpad settings" and uncheck "tap to click".

This makes the touchpad work as designed but you need to use the buttons to click and can't accidentally jump about.

Enterprise_1701C

I got so fed up with this that I swapped to a wireless mouse.

Just one tip - if he suddenly finds a sentence or two has been wiped (yes - been there, done that!) CTRL + Z gets it all back.

closed

fingers touching the touchpad?