Touchpad Sensitivity Issue (Or Hardware Problem?) Toshiba A660

[Guest]

Here's one of the oddest computer problems I have ever encountered. When I try to type or use the touchpad on my Toshiba A660 (Brand New As of Today) it "right clicks." That is to say, it brings up the right click menu or highlights text over and over. I disabled double tap and scrolling and made the touchpad sensitivity super high but it still does it. The most curious part is that when you touch the chassis of the Toshiba A660 (as far left of the touchpad as the Intel sticker) it brings up the right click menu. Including resting your palm on it! It will also summon the right click menu as far up as the left Shift key and as far right as the m key. It behaves as if that entire area is a giant right click button. I can type if I type very gently and don't touch my hand on the left palm rest anywhere.

Help me. Is this a software issue or hardware? I want to be sure before I box it and return it.

[ptoche]

Re: Touchpad Sensitivity Issue (Or Hardware Problem?) Toshiba A660

have you found out what the problem was?

I'm having some nightmare touchpad issues too. My only truly successful workaround has been to disable the entire touchpad and to reassign some keys to the right and left mouse clicks. But it can be inconvenient not to be able to drag the cursor across the screen!

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

helps but it doesn't control that many features to be useful on a state-of-the-but-is-it-art synaptics touchpad my laptop came equipped with. Still, you may want to try it on your machine.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Touchpad Sensitivity Issue (Or Hardware Problem?) Toshiba A660

When electronic hardware has "touch" sensitivity as you describe it often means that your chassis is not properly grounded. With normal electronic devices a "floating" chassis introduces floating "ground" values. For example, I was computerizing an ag business that made plastic irrigation pipes. When clerks typed in text boxes, and sometimes when machines set unused with the cursor in an empty text box, characters would "miraculously" appear without being typed. Since it was happening on all 6 of the workstations in their office I knew it wasn't specific to a particular machine. A volt meter didn't show anything, so I put an oscilloscope on the AC socket. The 117 volt AC wave form I saw had a 12 volt offset from zero when I put a portion of the spectrum through a FFT program. I asked if they used any 12 volt equipment. The shop foreman said their Lincoln welders used 240 to 12 volt AC transformers, which was rectified to 12 volt DC. It turned out that the center wire to that transformer was not AC grounded. When they grounded the centerwire the problem went away.

Personally, if I purchased any electronic equipment that showed touch sensitivity I'd take it back. It is defective.

An aside: Most electronic circuits today use VLSI chips that contain many Operational Amplifiers, which is a marvel of electronics because of their versatility. For many of their usages they use a "virtual ground". Using other op amps that ground can be converted to a real ground by software control. Depending on their usage I could see a scenario where a particular piece of software would ground a critical op am during power up, allowing the machine to work fine. If the powerup software didn't have that feature parts of the electronics would "float" and be touch sensitive. But, until further proof arises, I will ascribe your problem to a bad circuit board.