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MsTriste
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21 Apr 2007, 6:26 am

Backstory: Bought a Dell laptop two months ago with Vista. Had countless errors so sent it back and got a replacement, and there is no doubt the other one was completely messed up.

Have been doing well, no problems with Vista (except lack of support - argh) except for one little annoyance. If somebody could tell me whether this is OS related, I'd appreciate it.

I'll be typing (it's a laptop with a touchpad below the keyboard) and as I'm typing, frequently the cursor will jump to a previous place in the text and I'll be typing away without a clue that my text has jumped up a paragraph. This happens several times a day. WTF? I've used Dell laptops with their touchpads for years, so can't imagine it's my technique. Have no clue what's going on...



Gilb
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21 Apr 2007, 7:11 am

that just sounds to me like they have added some strange key gesture and you might be inadvertently telling it to do this or that, i personally find Microsoft word really bad for this.



BenJ
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21 Apr 2007, 7:16 am

you are not resting your wrists on the mousepad thingy are you? or on a function key or something... its easy to do without noticing while you type away.



Lygophile
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21 Apr 2007, 11:54 am

I also have a Dell laptop, and had the same problem, I can tell you that the problem is almost certainly that you are brushing the touchpad with your hand while typing, mine responds to even the slightest touch.
There should be a setting in the touchpad properties in Control Panel called "Palm Check" or something similar that will attempt to detect when your palm is brushing the touchpad, but I found that it really never helped me. You can also decrease the sensitivity of the touchpad, but then it becomes that much harder to use it the rest of the time.
Another solution would be to get a USB mouse, and then in Control Panel you set it to disable to touchpad when a USB pointing device is connected. That's what worked for me.

Hope that helps.



MsTriste
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21 Apr 2007, 1:24 pm

Thanks for the advice. I think I need to research both the function keys and the touchpad settings.
:)



dumbgenius
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21 Apr 2007, 3:50 pm

My Compaq laptop did that too. Sometimes hitting the keyboard when typing caused problems. It was so annoying that I disabled it and used a USB mouse. Mine has a button above the touchpad to disable it when it's not needed. I don't know if Dell laptop have that button though.