Occasional random cursor movement while typing
When typing on my laptop, occasionally my cursor will skip back (up) a
few lines and I'll be entering text in the midst of text previously
entered. Sometimes I can't reproduce it, but this morning when typing
the word "we're" the cursor would jump up about three lines when I hit
the apostrophe (single quote " ' ") key. I deleted the text I
accidentally entered because of the problem, then retyped the word and
the cursor again jumped back to that same spot. It repeated three or for
times, then began to act normally.
It happened again typing this e-mail message. I was typing the word
"typing" and the cursor jumped up a couple of lines and started entering
text in the midst of the word "text."
What's happening here? My sleeve isn't touching the touchpad nor did I
bump the Trackpoint nor the mouse. I'm not accidentally hitting the
wrong key. The embedded 10-key pad isn't activated and the keys in
question aren't on that part of the keyboard anyway. The machine in
question is an IBM R40 laptop running Lenny. I have a triple-boot
system: two versions of Debian (I'm in Lenny now) and WinXP. I don't
r(it just jumped down the page two lines and to the left)ecall it
happening in XP, but I only use XP a few times per year. I think that it
happens in the other version of Debian (I think I've got Sarge there).
I'm assuming that this is not a keyboard issue. If it were, I would
think that the key would either enter properly or not, rather than enter
an improper character. Or is it a CPU going nuts? Is it (just did it
again when I typed the "t" in the previous word) a problem with X or a
the driver for the keyboard, mouse, etc.? This has been happening for
months. It's weird and frustrating. How can I diagnose this?
Elmer E. Dow
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