[Computer Corner]

Originally Posted by scoutii

I asked because if it is a laptop, you may be touching it's "built in mouse" ie the touch pad or joystick. Either type can be turned off, if you are using a traditional mouse.

right on. It is either your palm touching the touch-pad or a virus. It is possible the touch pad has gone bad, but that is unlikely. You can always troubleshoot it by getting an external mouse and keyboard and seeing if it still does it.

[Halibut]

Ah, I found my people! This was driving me crazy on my new Dell laptop. I couldn't type more than a few characters anywhere -- online text fields, email, Word docs -- without the cursor jumping back or up/down to another line. I looked up suggestions online and most recommended resetting the cursor pointer, which I did, but no change. Finally saw a suggestion about disabling the touchpad. Duh.

The new Dell has a much larger touchpad and I didn't even realize I was brushing it as I typed. There's supposed to be an option to disable the touchpad while typing, but I never found that. I also had a really hard time finding the touchpad properties file since it wasn't in the taskbar where it's supposed to be. Finally just did a file search on "touchpad" and found the .exe file. Saved that sucker as a taskbar shortcut. I almost exclusively use the mouse so ended up disabling the touchpad entirely. It can easily be re-enabled if needed.

Hope this helps someone; it was a bugger for me to figure out!