Wednesday, September 18, 2013

I hate touchpads; jummpy zig-zaging pointer/cursor, and disabling the touch pad while typing

I hate touch-pads.  Yes, they have gotten better, especially with muti-touch functionality.  However I really love the GNU/linux middle click to paste highlighted text, and three finger middle click lacks the accuracy one really wants to place a line of text in a specific spot.  The dislike of touch-pads seems to be genetic, father once made his company replace his touch-pad with a trackball (it was modular so it could easily be swapped out), but I digress.

Currently I'm experience 2 different touchpad issues on my ASUS K55A under Ubuntu with Mate and Manjaro / Arch linux with Openbox that seem generic enough to not make a specific blog for my laptop.

Issue 1: Jerky mouse pointer behavior
The first is a really crazy issue where I when to visit the girlfriends family and suddenly my touch-pad was going haywire.  Turns out my the house I as in had lower quality power (probably due to their heavy use of CFL bulbs) and my power adapter was generating EM interference with the touch-pad because of it.  Many forums claim this is due to a faulty power supply, and Dell, Apple, and HP have replaced their afflicted user's adapters.

-- Follow-up: after much testing it's definitely due to power quality issues.  Non-OEM charges continuously replicate this experience.

Issue 2:  Touch pad active while typing, causing accidental clicks and focus changes
This section turned out to be longer than I expected, and I'm still updating it, so it has been moved to a separate post:
http://add4jhf.blogspot.com/2013/09/touch-pad-deactivation-while-typing-and.html

No comments:

Post a Comment