Cursor jumps to different location accidentally while I'm typing 1

[nate901]

This has been driving me nuts for a few years really on Windows PC's and I've finally decided to see if anyone can help. It basically only happens to me while I'm typing on laptop keyboards for whatever reason. I am not a good typist at all but I can 'peck' pretty fast after all these years and pretty much at the point of not having to look at the keyboard anymore while I type. Often when I am typing in an email or document I accidentally hit some sequence of keys that sends the cursor quickly to another point in the material and my newly typed characters will now be entered at the wrong place. I know there are keyboard shortcuts to get around and I have referenced several lists of them but the ones pertaining to cursor movement all involve hitting either the Ctrl or Shift key along with arrow keys, Home or Del and when this problem occurs my right fingers are no where near those keys as I'm always in the middle of typing words when it happens. Furthermore the cursor movement does not go to places those shortcuts pertain to. So it seems there's some secret cursor movement key strokes that I keep hitting accidentally and I have yet to figure out what they are nor how to disable them through the Control Panel or someplace. Has anyone ever had this problem and figured out how to fix it? Thanks.

 

[guitarzan]

I suspect you are inadvertently pressing the touchpad without realizing it, or the touchpad is too sensitive. I would see if you can find the touchpad options, and either disable it entirely (if you use an external mouse), or disable all the advanced features (like double-tap, scroll etc).

 

[guitarzan]

Here's a link that shows some of the options for Syanptics touchpads as an example, but yours could be different:

https://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/kb0/HTD3101Z30000R01.htm

 

[xwb]

I normally position the cursor over the save button before I start typing. That way, at most, I just lose one character.

 

[SamBones]

I've experienced the same symptoms and found I was accidentally hitting the touchpad. So one more vote for that cause. Using a mouse with touchpad turned off solved it.

My parents were experiencing something similar and thought they had a virus or something (Actually my Mom said, "I think our computer has worms"). Turned out they had a mouse that was going bad and sending random spurious signals to the computer. Swapped out the old "ball" mouse for an optic mouse and all has been good.

 

[gbaughma]

Using a mouse with touchpad turned off solved it.

Second.


Just my 2¢

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

 

[MikeHalloran]

You don't need to disable the touchpad entirely.

Somewhere in the touchpad driver is a function usually called 'touch to click' or 'tap to click' or something similar. Just turn that off.