When I was a kid growing up in the 1960’s I always looked forwards to watching Blue Peter on BBC1. Some of my friends were ‘Rainbow’ fans, but for me it was Blue Peter. And every week they would make something that, nine times out of ten, was pretty useless and pretty crappy. But what was interesting is that whatever they made, they always used items and materials that you could generally find around the house (except, perhaps, for ‘sticky backed plastic’ but since that was used almost every week I suspect that most household with young children already had a stash of that ‘just in case’). Anyway, these days I guess we would think of that as being very ‘green’ and ‘recycling-minded’ (which I am in full agreement with, bye the way!).
So, this morning I had a ‘Blue Peter Moment’. This is what happened…
I have this Lenovo laptop (it’s a T500 should you ask), but whenever I start typing (a document, an email, some program code) the cursor suddenly and without warning jumps. Sometimes it jumps to the beginning of the line, sometimes it jumps several lines up. And always without warning. The first I know of it is when I see a load of gobble-de-gook on the screen (no comments about my coding style please). It is really frustrating, and the number of times I have cursed Vista in beyond count. Vista does get the blame for a number of things. Anyway, this has been going on for weeks and by this morning I had had enough – either the laptop goes out the window - or I do. But, never one to do things in a hurry, I delayed opening the window and did a google search instead – after all this is a computer, and software, and there must be a reason that it behaves like this – and if I can find out that reason then I am half-way to finding the solution.
It became apparent quite quickly that this is typical ‘touch pad’ behaviour – what? – I don’t use the touch-pad. Actually, it turns out that I do – it’s just that I didn’t realise it. I found that when I type I occasionally let my thumb drag on the touch-pad and that cause the cursor to move. How stupid is that. But what is the solution? There should be a way of disabling the touch-pad, but it appears that on the T500 there isn’t (yes, I know, it is hard to believe). Perhaps there is some software that will disable the touch-pad but just while you type, and when it detects that there is no typing then it enables it – sounds like a neat solution but I can’t find any software to do that.
And then I had my Blue Peter moment!
If I can’t disable the touch-pad then there must be a way to de-sensitize it. Simple really (and better than the obvious alternative of having my thumb amputated), a piece of card cut from a 5*3 Index Card and taped over the touch-pad. And that’s it. I won’t claim that it looks very professional, I won’t claim that it won’t eventually fall off, and it certainly doesn’t look cool. But it works.
A simple solution to a simple problem.
