Problem with cursor jumping around while typing on laptops with touchpad and Windows 7

Posted Date: 28-Jun-2011	Category: Troubleshooting
Author: Tony John	Member Level: Diamond	Points: 100

Have you experienced a problem with your laptop where the cursor jumps around to a different position while typing? In this article, I will talk about the jumping cursor problem I experience in my Lenovo Y560p laptop and various solutions I found so far.

If you don't have time to read the whole article about the cursor jumping problem, here is the conclusion about this problem and the work around:

The cursor jumps around while typing in Windows 7 laptops which has touchpad. The work around is to install a utility called "touchfreeze", which will sit in the system tray and lock down the cursor while you are typing.

Cursor jumping problem in Windows 7 laptops with touchpad

I recently purchased a Lenovo Y560P. It is a great laptop computer, with the most powerful configuration I ever had. I installed Windows Virtual PC and it can smoothly run multiple instances of Windows at the same time without any problems.

I was happy with my Lenovo 560P until I started experiencing a strange problem. I am not sure if I had this problem from the beginning, but I started noticing it often recently. The problem is jumping cursors.

I write lot of blogs like this one. When I am typing something fast, all of a sudden the cursor jumps to another position suddently. If I do not notice the change in the cursor position immediately, I may continue typing and scrample all the text I type.

The jumping cursor may appear to be a small problem for most of the others, but is a really big pain for me. Since I write a lot of articles and I type it pretty fast, this is an annoying problem. The jumping cursor really slows down my work and affect my productivity.

In the beginning, I thought this is my mistake and I might have been touching the builtin touch pad in the Lenovo laptop. Then I practiced typing without even accidentally touching the touchpad while typing and I took extra care to avoid moving my hand above it. But the problem continued. After several attempts, I confirmed that I am not touching the touch pad and that is now what causing the jumping cursor problem.

This made me think that this is a problem with the laptop itself. I did a quick search in Google for "Jumping cursor problem in Lenovo laptops". To my surprise I found a lot of people have raised this complaints in various forums. But I did not find any good solution suggested by anyone, other than saying disable the touchpad, do not touch the touchpad etc. I was not convinced. If I can't use the touchpad, then what is the use in having a great laptop? I was not ready to give up and continued my research.

Jumping cursor problem in Dell, HP, Sony laptops

I searched for jumping cursor problems in Dell, Sony and HP laptops and found that many people hav reported such problems on all those laptops. I found several complaints about the cursor moving around while typing in many computers including:

Dell Inspiron Laptop
HP Pavilion dv2715nr
Sony VIO laptops

I found a very funny solution to the cursor reposition problem in a very reputed website (ehow.com). According to them, this is happening due to the buildup of static electricity and all you have to do to resolve this is, remove the battery and and start the laptop by connecting directly to Ac power. If anyone ever solved this problem by removing the battery, let me know. I will be surprised to hear that.

In an HP forum, I found someone reporting that this is a normal behaviour for HP laptops and you should expect that the cursor will jump all over while typing.

I read few cases where Dell laptop users reported the problem to the company and Dell performed extensive tests to figure out the problem. But they could not come to any reasonable conclusion.

causes and Solutions I found for the jumping cursor problem in laptops with touchpad

Some of the reasons and solutions I found so far are:

1. You may be accidentally touch the touchpad while typing.

2. The touchpad may be over sensitive and even the pressure generated while you move your hands over it could cause the cursor to jump elsewhere.

3. It could be a virus causing your cursor to move all over while you type.

4. You may have wrong or outdated drivers.

None of the above reasons was convincing to me. How can an outdated driver cause the cursor to change position? How can this problem be so common in all computers including HP laptops, Dell laptops, Sony computers and Lenovo laptops? Do they all have bad drivers released at the same time?

Jumping cursor problem in Windows 7

When I learnt that the cursor moving problem exist in laptops from manymanufacturers, I started thinking this could be a Windows problem. So I started looking for jumping cursor problem in Windows 7 and I was not disappointed. A lot of people have reported similar problems with all kinds of computers using Windows 7.

Some one suggested to uncheck the option "Hide pointer while typing" to resolve this problem. It was an easy option to try but did not make any difference. My cursor continued to jump all over when I type pretty fast.

Using an external keyboard solved the problem, but that is not the solution I was looking for. I bought the laptop to use it without an external keyboard and external mouse. I did not want to stop using the features of the laptop to get the cursor behave the way it is supposed to.

Some people have reported that making the touchpad less sensitive would resolve the problem, but then you will have a hardtime using the touchpad to actually move the cursor around.

My conclusion was, almost everyone who uses a laptop with touchpad and Windows operating system face this problem. Microsoft forums are flooded with complaints about this problem and not many reliable solutions offered by anyone.

This concludes that the jumping cursor problem on laptops with touchpad is a problem with Windows and not with the laptop manufacturers, hardware or drivers.

Solution to the jumping cursor problem in Windows 7

TouchFreeze software - solve cursor jumping problem while typing

I found a work around for this problem. The solution to cursor jumping problem was to use a utility called "touchfreeze" which will freeze your cursor while you type, thus avoiding the jumping problem.

I downloaded the touchfreeze software from Google code website and installed. It seems to have solved the problem temporarily. After I installed the touchfreeze software, I could not reproduce the cursor jumping problem anymore in my Lenovo Y560p laptop anymore. I am yet to try this solution on any other computer and I am pretty sure this will solve the problem.

This is not the real solution for this problem. This is only a work around until Microsoft come up with an appropriate problem to handle this problem on the laptops with touchpads.

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