Keyboards & Touchpads

[jhvance]

I'm still "having fun" getting to know the new P770-BT4G22 laptop acquired a couple of months ago, and am still primarily using the touchpad and its buttons rather than shifting to an external mouse.  I'm likely to do that eventually, though that will commit one of the USB ports, mostly because there are times when the touchpad will respond to inadvertent or deliberate touch in ways I dislike despite a number of adjustments made in the settings to its sensitivity and zones.  Generally, I can live with those foibles while I get everything transferred from my trusty older 5205-S505/6 and become more familiar/comfortable with the Win7/64bit OS.

I have discovered one truly irritating characteristic of the touchpad mouse buttons (the left one, alas), but don't know if it is a) something that will "relax" over time with use or b) represents some sort of problem/defect in the mechanism itself, so will lay out the issue here and see what the forum wizards and others suggest.

When I press down to left-click something, there's a definite difference in the response and on-screen result between a soft press versus a hard press.  Both types will produce a clicking sound and feel as if there is the same distance travelled in the act of depressing it, but sometimes a soft-press will not successfully toggle or actuate some webpage's on-screen button or successfully produce a continuous highlighting, but a hard-press will after I repeat the effort.  A soft-press will almost always be sufficient for placement of the cursor, which if not true would have been indicative of a defective mechanism.  I've also experienced one or two instances where I might not have maintained quite enough force while highlighting, and so in the midst of doing so the function shifts from a highlighting action to actually moving the previously highlighted text -- THAT is the truly irritating part, so I've learned to maintain strong downward pressure on the button when doing so.

I haven't discovered anything in the laptop's settings which would adjust this feature, so I'm left wondering if I should just make sure always to use the more forceful action or shift to the external mouse now and disable the touchpad completely -- I've done that on my other, smaller laptops where it was placed too close and my thumbs would inadvertently touch it while typing far too frequently.

Any advice or thoughts?

[jhvance]

This post has been looked at a few times, but no one's got any ideas?

If this behavior was happening with a mouse button, I'd guess there was some dust or crud inside it that's preventing a good contact, then disassemble it, give it a good blow with a can of compressed air, reassemble and test -- not easily possible with one embedded in the shell surrounding a laptop keyboard, though.

There are times when I REALLY have to use a greater level of force for the button to actually function,though there may be a "click" sound with much lighter pressure -- irritating, to say the least with a pretty new laptop.

If there aren't any responses to this after awhile, I will shift to an external mouse (probably the MS Arc Mouse I've used for several years with an older 5205) and disable both the pad and the buttons, but really don't think I should HAVE to do that.

[jhvance]

...and the %^&$#! thing will occasionally hang or stick in its depressed, active mode, i.e. continuously scrolling if the cursor's been placed on the vertical position bar of some webpage or document (PDF, word processor, spreadsheet, etc.), although it's not actually depressed.  I'm not certain if this is a mechanical dysfunction or is associated with some interruption in the communications (either internal for the processor I/O or external to/from the wireless ISP I use) as it seems to have these occasional hiccups of both types when a webpage that's loading briefly hangs or a file being downloaded in the background (using FF) encounters or triggers some pause.

Sometimes this sort of behavior will also manifest when I'm using the touchpad, and while my fingertip is moviing across the touchpad to move the cursor horizontally and/or vertically on the webpage I'm viewing blocks of text will suddenly become highlighted or even moved from one position to another in one 'swell foop' as a consequence of the motion -- a truly irritating circumstance.  If there's just highlighting with no transfer of text a light tap on the touchscreen or hitting the ESC button of the keyboard will reset things back to normal -- if text has actually been moved in an editable window, unless the app has an "undo" function I have to manually cut-and-paste to re-shift it back to the original state.

As there seem to be no thoughts on the issue as previously described in this thread, the least-hassle fix will be to change to an external mouse and disable the touchpad entirely.  But, if it's symptomatic of something mechanically or electronically amiss with the touchpad hardware & its keys I'd like to take care of that while its still under warranty -- but how to tell for sure that service is truly needed?  There used to be an excellent authorized service center for Toshiba in a nearby city (Austin, Texas), but they are no longer listed in Toshiba's warranty service database (though the firm is still in business) and the only option is to drive about 150 miles to Houston, Dallas or San Antonio or ship the laptop off to the "notebook repair center" in who-knows-where -- an additional irritant, to be perfectly honest.

Toshiba used to have diagnostic apps and built-in functions on some of the older models I've used, but so far I haven't been able to identify if something comparable exists for the P770 series -- anyone know if there is such a thing these days, or provide better direction on testing whether there is actually some hardware problem with the touchpad & keys?

[jhvance]

...and still no replies to this thread though a few people have looked.  Well, the problem with the left touchpad mouse button has grown a bit worse (sometimes I really have to press down quite hard to keep it engaged while highlighting or moving something without dropping out in mid-motion, or even on occasion getting a click attempt to actually be recognized/acknowledged), and the touchpad itself is starting to track in a somewhat jerky motion (particularly when draggig a vertical scrollbar up or down).

Guess I'll just end up disabling both and shift to using a wireless mouse.