Friday, February 1, 2013

Sensitive trackpad whose cursor jumps apparently at random under Windows? A solution!

I like my latest Win 7 notebook--i7 processor, 500 GB hard drive. Its Windows score is 4.7, but that's because of the graphics subscore. The processor's subscore is 7.1! I really, really like it...except for the reason I wished I'd never gotten it--the trackpad! I couldn't type a sentence without the cursor jumping all over the place, placing words inside of other words and generally messing everything up. The trackpad is so sensitive that the slightest brush, no matter how light, registered as a tap. I suppose I might have been able to solve things by turning off the feature that registers a tap on the trackpad as a press of the left mouse button, but I've used that feature on every other netbook and notebook without incident. I didn't want to stop using it now.

Salvation came in the form of the free utility Touchpad Blocker, which turns off the trackpad for a set period of time between 0.1 and 3 seconds after a keyboard key is pressed. One of the program's options is to have a bell ring each time the trackpad is stopped. I left it on as an experiment, but I finally turned it off because of how often it was ringing.

The bottom line is that Touchpad Blocker turned this notebook into what it should have been in the first place.

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