strange touchpad problem...

[savage]

In the past month or so I've developed a very strange problem with my touchpads on 3 different laptops.

1st laptop = Dell inspiron 600m, pentium M 1.4, 512 mb, Alps touchpad, driver v.5.4.104.4, on irq 12
2nd laptop = Toshiba ??
3rd laptop = Sony Vaio, pentium 4, 2.0 Ghz, 512 mb ram

sorry I don't know the exact specifications of the toshiba. The Toshiba and the Sony belong to other members of the household.

All 3 have the same problem...the dell and the toshiba are the worst, the sony is a little more sporatic.

When I move my finger on the touchpad, the mouse will either move a bit and then stop and then become unresponsive, or not move at all. If I continue moving my finger around on the touchpad, the cursor will eventually move for another split second, and then stop again. It's the same on all 3 laptops, and the same thing happens for everyone who uses them (so it's not my finger that's the problem!!!)

I thought it might be a driver issue, so I uninstalled/reinstalled the drivers on the dell but it did not help.

I ran the system diagnostics and they find no problems with the device (though i have the same problem moving the mouse). The system diagnostics is loaded at the startup screen (press a button at the beep), before windows loads, so the problem is not with anything loaded in windows. The thing I did notice was when I was testing the touchpad, it seemed to be most unresponsive at the top of the touchpad (i.e. the testing area would light up on the corresponding area of the touchpad that I touched...and I had the most problems getting the top to light up, though it would eventually though only for a split second).

In the device manager there are no problems noted.


Now...what makes the issue more strange is...today I took the laptop with me to starbucks...and the touchpad worked perfectly.

When I brought it back home...the problems started again. It's done this before too...it's always worked at starbucks, and the problems are only when I'm at home (only 2 places I've used the laptop in the past 2 months...before that I was out of town and had no problems either)



What could the problem be?  Is there some radiation in the atmosphere that affects the touchpad?  Is that even possible?  Nothing electrical been changed in my house over the last few months.
 :-?

[Raptor]

Are they connected to a network at home?

Do you have any Internet security...?

[savage]

they are connected to a wireless network at home, though it's been the same router/computers for the past 3 years.
Also, I usually use the Dell near the router, so I just connect it via the ethernet card and the wireless card is disabled.
The Toshiba has an internal wireless card and the Sony has an external linksys wireless card. But again, same cards for the past few years.

I have norton antivirus 2005 on all 3 laptops, and they're running the windows xp firewall. I run Spybot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-aware on all 3. I've ran the Windows Live online virus/spyware scanner (safety.live.com). No viruses, no spyware.


Again, today I was at Starbucks and the touchpad worked like a charm....just got home and again it doesn't work.


I thought about the only thing that's changed in the house since I moved back here, and that was that we got 2 new wireless telephones. I unplugged them and took out their batteries to see if that helped, but it didn't.

[GX1_Man]

Is the problem related to having an external mouse plugged in at the same time?

[savage]

No...the problem occurs whether or not the external mouse is plugged in.

[Raptor]

Is Norton 2005 licensed and up to date?

[savage]

yes.


I'm almost positive it's not a virus or spyware issue. I've tried to keep my system clean. Everything is up to date. Also, I don't know of any viruses/spyware that only kick in when I'm at home.



on a side note, it was raining today...but once it stops, I'll be going out with my laptop to see if there's "radius" where it doesn't work. The starbucks I go to is 3 blocks away.

[Fed]

From Wikipedia...

Touchpads commonly operate by sensing the capacitance of a finger, or the capacitance between sensors. Capacitive sensors are laid out along the horizontal and vertical axis of the touchpad. The location of the finger is determined from the pattern of capacitance from these sensors. This is why they will not sense the tip of a pencil or other similar implement. Gloved fingers may be problematic (such as in a cleanroom environment) but can sometimes work. Moist or sweaty fingers can be problematic for those touchpads that rely on measuring the capacitance between the sensors.

There's some food for thought, some experimenting may be in order.