Another thing that I've noticed about most touchpads... you don't have
to touch them to move the mouse. And right after a shower I can have my
finger almost an inch away, from one, and still move the mouse in
erratic ways.
Cheers,
Patrick
On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 21:34 -0800, Robert Reed wrote:
> My theory for this issue is that when a cosmic ray goes through the touchpad,
> it makes the cursor suddenly move somewhere else on the screen. Maybe some
> touchpads are more sensitive to this than others.
>
> Just kidding, but who knows if it might be true or not? Some amateur radio
> operators have postulated the same phenomenon (cosmic ray interference) for
> the fairly common problem of a stable linear amplifier with high
> amplification factors on the tubes suddenly going into a vhf parasitic
> oscillation for no reason at all. A parasitic on an amplifier like that
> manifests itself as a device just sitting there running in receive mode (not
> being used to transmit) and suddenly goes off like an M80 firecracker and
> blows up a few components in the 3 KV circuitry feeding the tube plates. A
> few have theorised that a cosmic ray can pass through the plate of the tube,
> exciting the normally stable circuit into a resonant vhf oscillation that
> exceeds the component limits, and up she goes in smoke.
>
> Luckily our touchpads aren't that dangerous, but my experience so far is of
> seeing Jaye's problem on many more laptops than not, probably on about 70 or
> 80 percent of the laptops with touchpads that have been in my immediate
> environment. Most of them are windows machines, with the exceptions being my
> Vaio in Debian and Jaye's with Kubuntu (if I'm not mistaken). Of 6 Dell
> laptops issued here at work, only one does not have this problem with all of
> them being WinXP Pro OS's.
>
> Bob Reed
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