I have a very irritating problem with my Dell Inspiron 1520, particularly when using Word (although the problem appears anywhere where I am doing typing - eg on here or typing emails). The cursor for no apparent reason just moves. I am not touching the mousepad and it will move from where I am typing to somewhere further back so that I end up typing in the middle of stuff I have already typed. It is doing my noggin in. Please help!
funny you should mention that, barmaid, I had exactly the problem on my Dell lappy last night. I was typing a long e.mail to a friend of ours and the cursor kept jumping back to earlier in the e.mail. It was driving me nuts. But after I finished that e.mail and went to another one, it was fine. It's been OK today. Can't say I know what it was, I thought I might have accidentally tapped a combination of keys ..... I use a plug-in-to-the-laptop "logitech" mouse.
I've got that problem too Barmaid with my laptop sometimes I can't control the cursor. And at the moment everything is going slow, I'm typing a few words before they appear on screen, or having to wait a few seconds when I click on something before it changes. I'm not a techniphobic at all, I hope someone will tell you what to do.lol
It's possible that you're dragging the heel of your hand over the trackpad whilst you type and that is moving the cursor. There should be a setting in Control panel for the touchpad to disable it whilst typing. Can't say exactly what as I'm on my work desktop at the moment so no touchpad to disable :-)
I'd say you were definitely catching the touchpad with the palm of your hand.
If you have the full drivers installed for the touchpad you should have a little red icon down near the clock that will say something like "synaptics touchpad" when you hover the mouse over it, if you double click on that to bring up the properties there are 2 settings top look out for and try.
There should be a setting to enable palm detection and a slider to set the level it's at, that would be the first one I'd try.
There may be another setting to disable the touchpad while typing, if you can find that then it's worth trying that too.
I starting experiencing this problem a couple of months ago. It is true that accidently touching the touch pad can induce this problem but in my case I know that this in NOT occurring. I have asked several "experts" and they not been able to come up with a solution. This problem is a bloody nuisance and I would appreciate any help from anybody on this matter.