A solution to drifting pointer stick / Touchpad

Question

I finally had it with my I4000 pointer drifting and/or locking up. Normally it would correct itself with a few minutes of patience but the frequency in which it occurred finally drove me to do something about it. I had tried disabling, enabling, adjust, (hitting) - all to no avail. After much pondering and playing, I decided that the pointing stick had to be the culprit as it was often causing the pointer to be pegged to the edge. It must have been sending so many signals to some device driver - it caused it to lock up or slow down at times. I found that pressing hard on the pointer stick would bring it into visibility enough to use the touchpad. Also, flexing the case - I could cause it to drift else where. Reading posts in the forum for Inspiron and latitude - especially those around the flex in the keyboard led me to try and understand what was going on mechanically with the keyboard. I took the laptop apart - actually, just removed the keyboard (5 screws on the back). Low and behold, I found so much crud underneath the keyboard that it must have been shorting out the various keyboard/touchpad controls. That took me to do a good cleaning of the back side (vacuum, tack cloth), vacuum of the areas under the keys, removing the screws holding the pointing stick and cleaning the areas under and around it. Put it all back together - and it works like a charm. NOTE I don't recommend the above unless you are somewhat mechanically and electically inclined. Don't if you feel you are going to be dropping any screwdrivers into the internals.

snapohead · Answer

Its good to hear that cleaning the kb fixed your problem, but its quite unlikely that all this crud would be shorting out things. Its more likely that the reseating of the kb cable has provided a temporary solution. With the kb cable, there is a wide cable and a thin cable. A solution would be to cut the thin cable, making sure to cover both ends afterwards as to not short anything. Keep in mind though that this will leave you with a non-working touckstick.

razen · Answer

Thanks for the response.

As this is a technical problem, there are often many options to take to solve the problem. Your proposal would eliminate the pointer stick alltogher and the problems associated with it. While an option, I would call it one of last resort.

As for what I did, yes I did pull the cable and reset it. It's possible that this action had eliminated some of the oxidation on the connections of that cable. However, if you look back at the post (and related posts elsewhere), there are a number folks who have had unusual pointer actions that responded to such actions as pressing on the case, lifting the case, twisting it - etc. This behavior points to some sort of connection that is opening or closing as the contacts are moved - or something is brought into contact.

Given the amount of crude that I found (hair, dust bunnies, crumbs), I concluded that enough of it had worked its way into the mechanical componenrs of the keyboard and/or the pointing stick. By cleaning the crude - and extracting some of the stuck material from around the above - I have managed to eliminate the problem. I'm running 2 weeks now with out a single drift - and without cutting the small cable that is used to control the pointing stick

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