FE21M Weirdness...furious

For a while now my newish (August 06) VAIO notebook has this occasional habit, where, just say I'm typing a paragraph in Microsoft Word, it will bring the cursor up 4 lines, where I will be typing in the middle of a previous paragraph.

Every once in a while it will do this, which I overlooked and just repositioned the cursor and carried on, not caring considering it was the laptop's only flaw.

However I got furious today. One module of my university course has us create an online "webfolio" through a Macromedia Flash-driven system called Pebble Pad. You're presented with a list of your assets (webfolio, any images you've uploaded etc) and from there you can edit them - much like an online HTML webhost. I was editing my webfolio today, tidying it up before hand-in, and I'm typing within a text field (so "focus" is on this text field). So I'm typing, moving paragraphs around, and hit my "delete" key followed immediately by "enter" key.

Half way between this action I saw an alert, which turned out to be "Do you want to delete your webfolio?" - which, yes, my "enter" made the choice of "yes". I was furious at this. Whilst I will hunt down the creator of Pebble Pad to ask if there's some shortcut key you can hold down and press "delete" to erase it... I just don't get it. Irritatingly there was no recycle bin so I had to redo all of the webfolio extremely quickly before lecture (being a webdesign student I made it on time), but I wasn't holding down a shortcut key, and I think it may be related to the weird cursor moving thing I first talked about.

Or maybe it's something to do with the "Fn" key? as I have no idea what that is. I want to note that I was an external mouse - is there any chance I am irritating the in-built laptop finger pad mouse by typing? Can you disable it?

Any replies most greatful.

 

Chances are, you're brushing the mousepad with your palm. You can disable the touchpad while typing in the options menu.

I've had a similar thing happen, I know how infuriating it can be. Good you were able to redo it so quick!

 

Also seems like poor design to have the "Are you sure you want to delete ____?" prompt's default answer be 'Yes.'

The 'disable while typing' feature was the very first thing that came to my mind after I read your first paragraph too.

 

hey guys thanks for reading my post. I'm going to try and disable the mouse whilst I type somehow... and you're exactly right, having the default answer to be "yes" is very bad design, they will be informed!

 

haha, embarrasingly I can't seem to find the option to disable the mouse whilst typing (unless it's just "hide the mouse while typing"). Anyone know off hand where it is?

 

Google says:

..which is how I remember enabling it (although it was on by default on my SZ).

 

Oh you guys won't believe this. I installed the Synaptics Touchpad Driver (Sony was listed in manufactuers so assumed it was okay). Restarted computer, touchpad still worked - but it had disabled my keyboard. I couldn't type my password to login to Windows!!!

After an hour of experimenting with safe mode etc, "last known good configuration" managed to give me my keyboard back. I uninstalled that driver, and have cut out a cereal box and elavated it above the touchpad.

Problem solved, hahaha. Talk about one thing leading to another though....

 

Heh..good solution there.

I think the FE uses an ALPS touchpad though, not Synaptics. (This is the case with the USA version anyway) You should go to the Sony support site and download the driver there.

 

Good point, I will check out the Sony site and find the appropriate driver. This cereal box looks ridiculous