Left mouse buttons on Samsung laptop feels unresponsive - I have to press it longer than I would usually do

Question

Left mouse buttons on Samsung laptop feels unresponsive.

When I press it, it often has no effect and I have to either press it longer or press it multiple times (pressing it longer seems to be the key though - I think that in thoses cases where it work after pressing multiple times I just pressed it long enough in one of the attempts).

Pressing "longer" here means just long enough to feel unsual, not multiple seconds.

My laptop is a Samsum R610. This behaviour started a few days ago without any obvious reason.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04.

Edit:

The problem actually went away after a few days. I guess this indicates that the reason might in fact have been some kind fo dirt, that eventually disappeared.

Answer 1

Perhaps the button is not making good/ clean contact. If you're technically inclined, you might want to consider cleaning it. But it's easy to screw up when opening the laptop for some people and might end up with bigger problems.

Answer 2

Go to the Samsung website and download a new driver called Synaptics pointing device driver :) just fixed mine

Answer 3

Probably a hardware problem. You could try a different OS, or just try the liveboot version of Ubuntu to see if it fixes it which would indicate a software problem (to which I would recommend just upgrading to 10.10 to see if that fixes it).

If it is a hardware problem, one fix would be to get a USB mouse and use that instead. Sometimes if a hair gets stuck under a key it can cause some of these problems.