How to fix touchpad drift?

Question

My MSI Wind touchpad started drifting towards bottom-left corner, when untouched. It's useless, the cursor runs away before I click on a selected point. I suspect hardware problem, it has been unstable since the beginning.

Reading between the lines here, I realized that it might be moisture. Is there a way to fix this without taking the whole thing apart? (Warranty is void already due to upgrade, but I would have to unscrew the mother board.) How to handle this anyway, if the disassemble is necessary? Should I use alcohol or something different?

Is there another possible cause?

I tried to use a blower brush on external case surface without success. The device looks clean: no dust, no grease.

EDIT: I looked inside and found no signs of damage. The touchpad area is actually just an imprinted in a case, so no moisture could have gotten there.

SOLVED: It turned out to be software problem. After installing a driver (xf86-input-synaptics), the touchpad not only behaves, but also gets scroll and tap features. The problem was that the default driver seemed to work at first not raising my suspicion.

Answer 1

In my experience, this is usually caused by the pointer device, not the touchpad. It is for that reason that I have disabled the Pointer device.

Answer 2

I have seen this before when a touchpad was cleaned with a spray furniture polish and I suspect the anti-static properties of the polish left a conductive coating across the surface which messed up the pad's operation. The fix was to rub down the pad with some lotion-free baby wipes followed by a damp paper towel and then a dry towel to remove all moisture. May not apply in your case, but a good clean may help.