Darren’s Diatribe

A friend and her daughter recently purchased identical laptops. They both found that while they were typing a document, the cursor would jump up several lines and sometimes text would just disappear.

Usually this sort of thing is a PEBCAC (Problem Exists Between Computer and Chair), but I offered to have a look at it. I got her to type something and, sure enough, the text suddenly disappeared, then shortly later the cursor suddenly moved and she was typing in the middle of some other text.

I tried it myself and had the same thing happen. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the cause was but I soon discovered that by typing with my palms not resting on the laptop, the problem went away.

Eventually I discovered that if your palm brushed the mouse pad even slightly, you would get the cursor moving and/or a mouse click. This was causing all of the problems.

I found an option in the control panel which turned off the mouse pad while you are typing and the problem disappeared.

The thing that I thought was stupid was that every user is going to have the same problem (in our case, 3 out of 3 did). This option should really be on by default so that people don’t need to go through all of the inconvenience discovering the cause and fixing it.

This scores Three Frowns