Focus Jumping

My daughter's Acer Aspire 5633 has developed a fault I've never seen before and I wondered if anyone had some constructive advice. It seems to be an intermitant problem where sometimes, focus shoots wildly and extremely quickly between the desktop icons, the taskbar icons and the Start button, making clicking on anything pretty much impossible. If a browser is open when this occurs, FF or IE, the address bar is included in this.

It seemed to start when she had Vista, and at that point, I thought it was a software problem. As she just didn't like Vista, I changed that to Ubuntu, although unknown to me, that same day she had gone and bought herself a copy of XP Pro, so I installed that for her. The next day however, the focus shifting was back, leading me to now see it as a hardware problem.

Any advice as to what might cause this, and the best way to put it right, will be gratefully recieved.

 

does she use a USB mouse or the touchpad ?

does this happen when she is typing or when she is moving the pointer(trying to) to select some thing ?
possible answer is touchpad set to sensitive or needs palm check switched on.
or needs the drivers updated.

just me thinking out load.
Phil

 

Hi there and welcome.

It sounds like there may be a hardware issue. Has she spilled anything on it?
If when this happens, try opening a new text document (Notepad, Word etc.).
If the cursor shoots accross the page it may well be a fault with the TAB key.

Check and see if it sticks at all, or whether there is something stuck under it.
It sounds to me like a fault with that, although it could still be software if the drivers on the Acer server are corrupt.

Let me know your finidings.

 

Simply asking her if she spilt anything on it was not enough for me so I removed the keys to check for traces of anything but found nothing and bearing in mind what you said, I paid particular attention to the tab key but they all seemed fine to me. I also downloaded and installed the most up to date Synaptic driver but to no avail. I then disabled Synaptic altogether, but still no joy.

 

it is looking like a hardware issue as a fresh install didn't fix the problem.
the next thing to try is a usb keyboard and switch the laptop keyboard off.
that would help point to ether a bad connection with the laptop keyboard or a more serious motherboard issue if it still happens with an external keyboard

Best of luck mate.
Phil