Cursor with a mind of its own

[Bus429]

My cursor occasionally bounces to a different part of a document while I type. If I'm not watching - I'm no touch typist - I enter text among that already written.
Anyone know why this happens? It is jolly frustrating.

[Saab Dastard]

Laptop with touchpad, by any chance?

SD

[Spitoon]

Or wireless mouse??

[Bus429]

Touch pad: occurred to me that could be problem so have been very careful - no avail. Could I de-sensitise it?

[BOAC]

Depending on the make there should be options for changing the way it works, including shutting it down and perhaps buying a cheap UBS mouse.

[Saab Dastard]

I have - fortunately - a nipple-equipped HP laptop, so I simply disable the touchpad in the BIOS.

SD

[rotorcraig]

My Dell laptop at work has both a nipple and a touchpad.

Used to have a "wandering cursor" problem and the temporary fix recommended by our IT folk was to disable the nipple, and use the touchpad only. Did that, and it worked absolutely fine.

The permanent fix was to replace the keyboard. The engineer explained that one of the ribbon cables connecting the keyboard to the motherboard wasn't sufficiently shielded, and so the keyboard was interfering with the nipple and sending it false signals.

Keyboard replaced, nipple re-enabled, all works fine now.

RC