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I just plowed my Dell Precision M6400 laptop and installed 64-bit Windows 7. Everything seems pretty good, except that occasionally while I am typing, my caret ends up somewhere else within the text. This is quite irritating, since text can quickly turn to gibberish that way. At first I thought I was just hitting the touchpad with my finger accidentally, but I am now pretty sure that's not it.

I think it might be the touchpad in some way, though. I do not have a driver for it, and the Dell support guy basically told me tough luck until they actually start shipping Windows 7 and supporting it. This problem does not occur when the machine's in a docking station -- it only occurs when it's standalone and I am using the laptop's keyboard, even with an external mouse.

So, how can I figure out what is causing this and fix it? There must be a driver that worked in 64-bit Vista, since that's what I had previously, but I am unable to find it. Dell guy wasn't too interested in this either.

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Can you disable the trackpad to confirm that the problem goes away then? – Thilo Sep 2 '09 at 2:14
I'd like to, but the default mouse driver that I have gives no way of doing that. I can't see that Windows knows anything about it. Are you talking about at a level beneath the OS? – Chris Farmer Sep 2 '09 at 2:16
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no, you'll need the touchpad driver (probably Synaptics). but they haven't released any windows 7 drivers yet but the vista driver works fine (at least the x86 version i have tested): synaptics.com/support/drivers – Molly7244 Sep 2 '09 at 2:36
Thanks. I did that. The Vista 64-bit synaptics drivers installed nicely and I haven't experienced my weird caret thing since then. – Chris Farmer Sep 2 '09 at 2:55
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Maybe molly should copy/paste her comment as the question answer. – Matthew Ruston Sep 2 '09 at 13:12
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2 Answers

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Trackpad is one reason, most common....

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I've found with laptop keyboard that I accidentally hit the control key while typing which can, depending on what I'm actually typing, move the cursor around the document.

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I thought I was causing it at first, too, but I had used this laptop for several months with Dell-installed Vista and never experienced that effect. Nonetheless, the synaptics driver install seems to have done the trick. – Chris Farmer Sep 4 '09 at 14:57
Oh well - but it looks like you've found the cause anyway. – ChrisF Sep 4 '09 at 19:22
Some drivers will detect "erroneous" touches on the trackpad and ignore them..so it's possible the default one doesn't do so. – Andrew Coleson Sep 5 '09 at 0:09
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