Blog dedicated to Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite) Technology; covers Apps Architecture, Administration and third party bolt-ons to Apps

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Laptop mouse pointer jumps all over the screen

I am currently facing a very annoying problem with my Dell 610 laptop mouse pointer. The pointer goes out of control and either goes to one corner and stays there or randomly keeps jumping. Any attempts to control it are defeated. This is not a mouse problem. As I have tried normal mouse with balls, optical mouse, laser mouse. It even happens when I have no mouse attached to my laptop. Apparently this problem is common to XO Laptop (One laptop per child) as described here. I have tried a few suggestions given by them:

1. Put four fingers on each corner of the touchpad. Works but its back to jumpy mouse in seconds
2. Use hand lotion to rule out static electricity. Yet to try this

I think the most effective way to solve this would be to disable the touchpad. While googling for "disable touchpad" I found this link. Unfortunately the navigation given was not present in my laptop. So I switched off my laptop and started it again. Pressed F2. Went to BIOS settings. POST behavior -> Mouse and Touchpad -> Serial (use serial mouse, disable touchpad). Saved and rebooted. Now the touchpad no longer works, and as predicted, the mouse pointer has stopped jumping. Good riddance. I was terribly annoyed by this jumping mouse menace for a long time. I should have done this as soon as I faced this problem.

2 comments:

Rick said...

I had a similar problem several years ago with an old Dell laptop (long since gone) and seem to remember solving it by reducing the tap sensitivity of the touchpad. I think the jarring/impact of my normal typing was causing the pressure sensor in the touchpad to think it had been tapped, even though I hadn't actually touched it. After reducing the tap sensitivity I really had to tap it pretty hard for the tap to be detected, but at least my cursor stayed where it was supposed to be otherwise.

Anonymous said...

am having the same problem - the
mouse sometimes goes totally out of control opens files etc resizing windows - all the signs of a virus except that malware etc dont find it at all

have updated drivers and will try the desensitiser

wanna hear something spooky - it stops when i umplug laptop from the mains - arghh
sometimes stops i should say - for a while and sometimes only stops for a few minutes - have to keep plugging in and out - great :(

will consider getting in a mouse proper and disabling the pad

will see how de-sensitise works after reboot - fingers crossed