Infamous wandering mouse cursor

Question

On a handful of different machines D600, D610 and a couple of our D620's the mouse cursor freaks out (external mouse is not connected) obviously our execs traveling would love to use the touch pad or the stick pointer for mouse control. I have seen this myself and made sure all the troubleshooting steps have taken place. Updating the Alps driver did not help, nor the BIOS.

I was wondering if anybody else has seen this, especially on different models.

I have one the mouse just started to wander to the left, or bounce all over the screen.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Funkdoobiest · Answer

On my dad's c600 and my cpx we had the same problem. You would have to pull that stick mouse pretty hard to use it. I always thought it was the stick itself getting bent since it's plastic. We sold my dad's C600 before we ever fixed it, so I dunno for sure. But we planned on replacing the keyboard to fix it.   I'd recommend swapping the keyboards with a good unit from another laptop to see if that's it. It would further back up that theory if the other donor laptop gets the same symptoms.

Baeron · Answer

Ah its a Touchpad right? In that case its most likely from a temperature spasm. Because the pads are heat sensitive (try using a pencil to move it.. it won't work) the heat can be dissipated all across the pad if you use it for a while. Whenever this happened to me I'd just blow on the Touchpad and wait for it to cool off, then it goes back to normal use.

adar · Answer

One thing that I have run into has to do with the stick pointer being the culprit. I had run into the wandering cursor before, but never really knew what was causing it. Until I had to work on an Inspiron 8100. I had a problem where it wouldn't charge or use the batteries, even though they were good. I found it was just one of the little daughterboards that had come unattached. However when I had the machine apart, a small spacer apparently fell out. This spacer has a screw that goes through it from the bottom center of the case, and happens to be right around where the pointer stick is. Without the spacer, it would happily let me keep tightening it down. Depending on how tight I made it, I would either have the wandering cursor, or the buttons would not longer register when I clicked them. Long story, just to tell you, check the center screw on the bottom of the laptop. Loosen it up, and gradually tighten it until it loses the wander. As long as the spacer exists, you won't be able to really OVER tighten it, but because the screw and spacer are not DIRECTLY under the pointer, tightening it could conceivably put the stick off kilter.

PCTech2K7 · Answer

Thanks for the replies. I am scheduled to take a closer look at this users D610 later. I will check it out and keep you updated.

fibercoax · Answer

Try turning off (in the bios) one of the pointing devices, either the mousepad or the stick.  Just use one of them.  Probably not your problem, but I was having the same symptom and this fixed it (I guess just the presence of my hand was affecting one of the pointing devices.)

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Infamous wandering mouse cursor

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