Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

[spleenharvester]

Tried different drivers to no avail. Any ideas?

Does not happen if I disable the touchpad, and my hands do not need to be even near the touchpad for it to happen.

Cleaned out the edges and no luck there either. Maybe a ground fault somewhere?

[trebo]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

seen copy adaptors off ebay cause cursor to be jumpy

[spleenharvester]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Good call, tried both my PA-10 and my PA-4E with the same result though unfortunately!

[Dimitrios]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Do you experience that when you are on desktop or while browsing using Firefox or Chrome which have hardware acceleration enabled? Also I would test RAM with Memtest for a couple of hours...

[spleenharvester]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Happens in both chrome and powerpoint 2007 (with chrome closed) most of the time. Will do that, cheers!

[shovenose]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Not sure if it was related but we had a customer at where I work return a Dell E6400 they bought refurbished from us, because it would do that.

We were never able to replicate the problem when they brought it back. We refunded them, sold it to somebody else, and they were happy with it and didn't have the problem.

So perhaps it does not like you? lol.

[Francisco.s]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Tried different drivers to no avail. Any ideas?

Does not happen if I disable the touchpad, and my hands do not need to be even near the touchpad for it to happen.

Cleaned out the edges and no luck there either. Maybe a ground fault somewhere?

Does it happen with a linux live-cd?
Could be that a capacitor doesn't filter touch-pad voltage properly.

[spidey]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

try without adapter, and then try without battery, change ribbon cable, try with an external mouse, re-install power managment drivers/utility.

[spleenharvester]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Just thought I'd bump this to say I'm currently on a completely different E5500 with completely different adapter etc entirely (this one has no rubber mouse thing in the middle of the keyboard I can't remember the name of). And I'm having a very similar issue: the touchpad often freaks out, intermittently locking up, and the only way to get it to work again is either press down on it really hard or stop touching it for ten seconds or so.

External mouse works fine.

Is there some kind of design fault with these I don't know about?

[3d0]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Had a dell once which worked fine until the mb died, after replacing the mb the cursor goes crazy up and down also the letters b,n,m and space don't work, you have to wait like 10min or so after ths OS boots up then they work normally? Tried updating the BIOS, formatting, different drivers nothing helped.
Works great with external mouse.

It could be the mb?

[spleenharvester]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Possibly, though it seems odd that I'd get a malfunctioning touchpad on two of the same model. Driver issue too possibly?

[3d0]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Possibly, though it seems odd that I'd get a malfunctioning touchpad on two of the same model. Driver issue too possibly?

Maybe the small cable socket doesnt have a tight fit, it's worth checking.
A quote from another forum:

First I replaced the touchpad with a new working touchpad... but the erratic activity was still there ... So replacing with a new touchpad didn't fix the problem ...

Second I took the erratic touchpad and placed it on another inspiron 1525 that had No problems ... and guess what ... the erratic touchpad was actually working fine..

So I narrowed down the problem, I was sure that the touchpad wasn't damaged at all.. I moved on to check any burned chips on the board, but everything looked in great shape..

Third and Last, I was gonna make sure that the cable connecting the touchpad with the motherboard socket , was secure and had a tight fit .... AND SURPRISE SURPRISE .. TOUCHPAD WAS WORKING FINE WITH NO PROBLEMS ... PLUS KEYBOARD WAS ACTING NORMAL ..

[momaka]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

I had the same issue happen on my Dell Latitude C500 (actually, several of them). Usually the cursor would jump all over the place every once in a while or slowly start moving towards a random corner on the screen. On a few occasions, I've had the keyboard lockup as well or just several keys not work. Turned out the issue was with the trackpoint. But in the case of my C500, the ribbon cable for the trackpoint is separate from the touchpad. As soon as I disconnected that, the problem was gone on all 3 laptops. Never had it appear ever since, and I've had that laptop for 2 years since that issue.

[dspok]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

i usually faced such problem in Inspiron N5110, N4110. Still today I haven't get rid of it.

[3d0]

Re: Dell E5500 - cursor jumps

Just to update you guys, I fixed the keyboard and partially fixed the mouse. I say partially because it's still not smooth as it used to be, but much better then before.
I used 2 layers of electrical duct tape underneath the ribbon cable to make a tight fit with the mb connector slot. I guess it gets loose over time, maybe heat plays a role, or just the amount of how many times and how it was disassembled before.

Well at least the keyboard is working perfectly now.