Yes this really does exist out there and it is surprisingly frustrating – especially when it is a close family member who keeps experiencing it. You know that if you are the home based tech support for your spouse, kids, and other family members then you get an earful when things go wrong with tech.
This buggy little cursor has jumped up in our house quite a few times and my initial diagnosis was that the touchpad was at fault because of it being contacted by the users palms as they typed. So my response at that time was to disable the touchpad since an external wireless mouse was being used anyway.
This helped initially but it continued to happen every once in a while. Well yesterday was the proverbial straw/camel’s back day and I had to figure out in earnest what was happening and solve it.
So of course I went to Bing and did a quick search and found several references to this very bug. Seems it happens across a range of OEM’s and therefore was suspected of being Windows related since it was the common factor across all the devices. One page even reported this happening on a Mac Book Air.
A common solution attempted was to lock out the touchpad however, just like I did myself, that did not alleviate the issue.
I then came across a post on a site called Techulator from June 20011 that discussed this and ultimately recommended a piece of software called Touchfreeze.
According to the description on the Google Code website Touchfreeze disables the touchpad and keeps the cursor from jumping around – and based on tests last night in this house – it works like a champ!
Once again I am the tech hero of my domain – at least for now.
Now here is the funny coincidence in all of this. As I am reading my Twitter stream this morning and preparing to write this post to spread the word about this great fix my friend and fellow MVP Vishal Gupta posted a tweet to a story he had just written about this very same issue and fix!
Now that was a little weird to say the least but I like the way Vishal thinks.
Anyway, if this is bugging you please check out Touchfreeze and let us know how it works for you in the comments below – thanks.
Download Touchfreeze from Google Code Site
Source: Techulator and Tweaking with Vishal
