I have a Dell Lattitude laptop. Every so often, the cursor rampantly go off on it's own to an edge of the screen & refuses to come back. I hit several keys trying to get it to stop. I also have a problem with it sometime jumping back to the middle of a word while I'm typing. Any answers, anybody?

Does it have only the Touchpad or does it have that little knob thingy between the key too, I remember we used to have similar problems with those, or do you use an external mouse. If you use an external PS2 mouse it should disable the Touchpad automatically (in some laptops), but if you use a USB mouse try to disable the touchpad and/or the little know thingy and see if that helps.

Originally posted by Mullet Man:


It's not an optical (external) mouse you're using is it? I have an optical moouse on my desktop at home and had exactly the same problem. the thing would just wander off around the screen. I found out that it didn't like my shiny black desk or the equally shiny and mostly black mousemat.

It quite often happens to me with my laptop too, but it's usually just my wrists touching the touchpad as I'm typing :p - I'm a lazy typist and rest my wrists on the keyboard, rather than holding them above the keyboard like you're supposed to!

Hi, just recently I got the same problem with my Laptop. I use USB optical mouse, although I turned off the touch panel the problem still occur. At that time I also restarted my laptop but it didn't help either. Is that caused by virus or just software/hardware trouble.

Thanx

Well at least I know I am not the only one. My wifes Dell Lattitude C510 has recently been experiencing the same problem. The synaptic pad has been erratic and when we plug an external mouse in we get the same behaviour. rebooting several times seems to stabilise things for a while until it eventually happens again. When her mouse is plugged in (USB) the synaptic pad is still active so I may look at this. Dell have indicated that it maybe the pad on its way out or the keyboard.

After many forums, I noticed that there are two specific problems being addressed. One is while typing the curser jumps to another line and continues from there. The other is when the curser jumps up and down the screen to the point you have no control of the curser. It will not respond to any commands except to stop at the hold of the touchpad. This happens for periods of time or until it is rebooted. My biggest problem is the latter. This appears to happen with both Windows XP and Vista on any computer.