I'd be curious what you come up with. I have a Dell Inspiron 8100, which is about 3-4 years old. Recently the touchpad/pointer have been on occasion acting funny where the cursor just zips off screen. I now am having a problem when the machine is in the docking station with the mouse. The cursor just drags really slowly by itself and then comes in and out of functionality.

I was going to try the fresh install but it doesn't sound like that worked. Have you found anything to help?

I have reviewed many old threads concerning the same problem and the only tangible fix I have found is to disconnect or cut the keyboard "stick".

Dell seem to ignore the problem or suggest "loading an updated driver" which everyone has tried.

We have 5 Dell laptops (Inspiron 4xxx) and this is the only one with this problem.  If we wait long enough the mouse settles down which leads me to believe it a resource or software conflict.

Sorry I can't offer any other insight but neither can Dell.

 

After working fine for years, the cursor on my Inspiron 8100 sometimes behaves, sometimes moves up or down, with not a hand near the computer. I've install the lastest driver from Dell and unchecked the box for "fast Windows startup" in the "Synaptics PS/2 Port Pointing Device" since the help file said that was a good idea for users experiencing cursor control problems. I've set the sensitivity for the pointing stick to highest level (no help). Disabling the pointing stick solved it for the moment, but since the behavior is intermittent I'll have to wait and see. For some reason, disabling the pointing stick reduced touchpad responsiveness to the totally unresponsive level. Going into the properties  of the device and clicking on Advanced, then setting the sampling rate to maximum helped.

Message Edited by twas on 05-25-2005 04:27 PM

In that series of laptop, the problem is generally related to a fault with the pointing stick located in the kb. Most of the time, loading the latest touchpad drivers and disable the pointing stick can work as a work-around. There are cases though where this doesn't seem to work. Another thing you could do is cut and insulate the thinner of the kb cables. Before doing that though, i would try unplugging the kb and using an external kb to rule out whether the pointing stick is the source of the problem.

if it settles down over time, then it can't be a resource conflict, and seems very unlikely to be a driver problem. Software doesn't get better (or worse) with time. However, hardware can get both better and worse with time. This looks like a solid symptom of a hardware problem with the thumb stick.