laptop keyboard suddenly playing up

December 21, 2023 2:47 PM

my laptop that i use for writing has suddenly started playing up. it lets me type normally for a few words or so then it suddenly freezes and won't type until I click on the place I was and then it works again or sometimes it starts typing in a completely different location on the document. how do I solve this? I've tried writing with both notepad and open office and the problem persists with both. thanks
posted by an opinicus to Technology (10 answers total)

Any chance you've got schmutz on your trackpad? That's usually the culprit for me, the trackpad gets damp or lotiony from my hands and then goes rogue moving my cursor around and clicking itself places.
posted by phunniemee at 2:50 PM on December 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah I suspect the trackpad too, or possibly that the keyboard is somehow activating the click. I would test it this way.

Open a metafilter post and go to the comment box. Then open a document elsewhere on the screen. Now click on the comment box (it should visibly highlight it), then move your cursor over to the other document but do not click. Now start typing.

When "the thing" happens, you will probably see the Mefi comment box stop being highlighted. If we're right, it is clicking either at the last location of the cursor or somewhere random. If it's the last location, it'll switch to that other doc, so keep typing when it happens and see if your letters appear there. If they don't, then we know it isn't just going to the last cursor location.

If it's clicking somewhere random, that is very weird! But double check that you don't have any kind of weird app open like a mouse firmware update thing or whatever.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:25 PM on December 21, 2023

If your laptop has a touchscreen, another possibility is a drop of water on the touchscreen causing it to register a stray touch.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:25 PM on December 21, 2023

Change the batteries?
posted by Miko at 6:23 PM on December 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I found the cursor jumping around unpredictably while I was touch-typing. It took a while, but I divined that my thumbs were hitting the touchpad now and then. Since I was touch-typing, I didn't look at the screen until after the fact and would find I'd typed a bunch of stuff in the wrong part of the file.

I did a simple solution. I taped an index card over the touchpad on just one side. I'd cover the touchpad while typing and only open it when I needed the touchpad.
posted by tmdonahue at 5:59 AM on December 22, 2023

Response by poster: thanks all. I think it is the track pad, when I try to watch a film the screen reacts as though I'm doing stuff with the cursor even though I'm not touching anything. I haven't spilt anything on it and there's nothing visable smeared on it ... is there anything I can do?
posted by an opinicus at 7:05 AM on December 22, 2023

My next steps would be: (1) wipe down the trackpad with a paper towel dampened with rubbing alcohol (to remove any non-evident gunge); if that doesn't help then (2) reboot the machine (to reload the trackpad software driver); if that doesn't help then it's probably an emergent hardware problem :( .
posted by heatherlogan at 7:27 AM on December 22, 2023

Random idea if the physical stuff fails: see if there is a before/after story involving bluetooth stuff. If there was a phone app install or laptop or tablet accessory lurking around might be worth a look.
posted by drowsy at 8:21 AM on December 22, 2023

I have some of your issues on my laptop and some on my PC. One thing that helped the freezing was to move everything that was on my desktop to a folder (a folder I call Old Desktop). You may already know this but stuff on the desktop is apparently configured to open faster (or something) and so it actively uses more bandwidth (or something) and has to save itself frequently (or something). You can see that I have only the very vaguest idea of why it helped, but it did help.
posted by janey47 at 12:04 PM on December 22, 2023

Response by poster: update. it's still playing up even when I disable the TouchPad and plug in an external mouse ...
posted by an opinicus at 7:20 AM on December 23, 2023