Anybody Else Have Weird Cursor Action?
Jeff VanderMeer • March 14th, 2008 @ 7:10 pm • Uncategorized
I’m calling the tech support people in the morning, but…so weird. The Symantic peoples got the virus off my computer, but ever since my keyboard/cursor seems messed up. I’ll be typing along and suddenly the cursor has gone back into the middle of another word or four words back, or jumps three lines up or five lines down or into the subject line of an email…while I’m typing. It’s driving me nuts.
March 14, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I had the exact same problem with a possessed cursor about a year ago. Reinstalling the mouse driver fixed it. I’ve also heard that this can happen with laptop touchpads though…..
March 14, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Thanks! I’ll try that!
JV
March 15, 2008 at 4:33 am
Do you have a trackpad, Jeff? If it’s a laptop, they may have just re-enabled it and not told you.
March 15, 2008 at 5:22 am
If it’s a laptop and you have that weird little joystick thing in the middle of your keyboard it is that. I had same problem, installed the proper touchpad drivers from the laptop site and disabled it. All fixed.
March 15, 2008 at 10:22 am
I do this all the time on my work laptop. I hit the touchpad with my thumbs when I’m typing, moving the cursor. Probably not your problem, but it was a mystery to me for a while until I figured it out.
March 15, 2008 at 10:43 am
Back when Ann was in charge of tech support at her company, she had a woman who was continually having strange strings of characters showing up on her monitor. They tried everything to solve it. Finally, Ann went down to the woman’s office and watched her as she was typing. She was a large woman, with huge breasts and bad eyesight. It turned out that she would lean forward to see what she’d typed and her breasts were pushing against the keyboard and creating the weird strings of characters.
Anyhoo, I’ve discovered if I click where I want to type and then move the cursor *out of the screen* I’m typing in, or to the side frame, the problem goes away. Still only a temporary fix.
Jeff
March 15, 2008 at 12:41 pm
If you’re able to move the cursor out of the screen, another temporary fix may be to go into the control panel, double click the mouse icon, move to the pointer options tab, and uncheck the “hide pointer when typing” selection.
March 15, 2008 at 12:56 pm
wow – this happens on my laptop, but i thought i was the only one!
i have even developed a hypothesis – the point of focus, usually situated at the wavecrest of your developing sentence, flicks to where your static cursorbar is currently sitting (i hope this part makes sense, i don’t know the official vocabulary)- i.e. to the middle of another word or four words back, or three lines up or five lines down or . . .
But it happens so randomly and so quickly that i haven’t been able to confirm this.
And it doesn’t answer why it happens either.
its pretty annoying though