AKICILJ: My laptop's Mexican jumping bean cursor

[thatcrazycajun]

My Sony VAIO laptop, which I have now owned for approximately 1.5 years, has served me quite admirably in most respects...save for one nagging little glitch it's had since I got it. When typing in a text field for any longer than about a dozen characters, its cursor suddenly jumps backward from the word I'm currently entering into a word halfway back down the line, or a line or two upward, turning already typed text into typos. This slows down my typing rather annoyingly and keeps me from entering long sentences or paragraphs as quickly as I do elsewhere.

Anyone know what might cause this? And how it might be stopped? Up to now I've just learned to live with it, but it seems to me this ought to be fixable somehow or other.

Comments

[luscious-words.livejournal.com]

I'll be checking back to see what the response is because my Dell does the same thing when I'm writing emails or posts. Drives me batty battier.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Same problem on my new eeePC. Assuming it's the touch pad jumping to where you left the mouse cursor last, which is usually a position like you describe, a few words back or a few lines up, where you last started typing. I tried installing an app that freezes the touch pad when you are typing, but it does nothing.

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Is your touch pad active? When I have that problem it's ususally because I have the touch pad turned on and the heel of my right hand hits the touch pad, sending the cursor FSM-knows-where.

My solution: Buy a wireless trackball (works places mouses don't, plus I just like trackballs) and turn the touch pad off. I don't recall having to do anything special to enable the trackball in Ubuntu -- you plug it in and it recognizes the trackball as a pointing device.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

How exactly does one turn off the touchpad? I am already using a USB wireless mouse most of the time.

[wheezinggirl.livejournal.com]

My Dell does the very same thing.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

it's almost certainly a touchpad thing. you need to disable tap-to-click (not sure how to do that in windows, if you're running linux you can do it via synclient or /etc/hal/fdi/policy depending)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

seconded with the touchpad. Wish I could disable *just* the touchpad; alas, Dell in its infinite wisdom says you have to disable both pad and eraserhead or not at all... :P

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

you just need to disable tap-to-click and then turn off focus-follows-mouse in your window behaviour.

[mshollie.livejournal.com]

What's AKICILJ stand for?

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

"All Knowledge Is Contained In LiveJournal."