It qualifies as one of the major annoyances of notebook-computer users: inadvertently moving the cursor by brushing against the touch pad while typing. One person I know actually taped a business card over his laptop's touch pad. Well, what the technique lacks in elegance it makes up for in simplicity.
But what if you want to disable your touch pad only when you have a mouse or other input device plugged in? That's my situation. When I'm using my laptop at a desk or other semipermanent location, I plug in a USB tablet to give me more precise cursor and mouse controls. Most people are more likely to use a USB mouse--often a miniature travel mouse--in that situation.
The touch pad-control options available to you depend on your make and model of laptop. Some systems include a setting that lets you disable the touch pad automatically whenever a mouse or other cursor-control device is connected to it. Unfortunately, my Sony Vaio isn't one of them.
My machine uses a Synaptics driver whose settings I can access via an icon in the notification area near the clock (aka the system tray) and through the Mouse applet in Control Panel. Either way, that's too many clicks to get to the setting that lets me disable the touch pad. That's why I created a shortcut to the dialog box and assigned a keystroke combination to open it... almost.
You can create a shortcut to a specific tab in a Control Panel dialog box, but the steps are slightly different in XP and Vista. First, open the appropriate Properties dialog box by clicking Start (in Vista) or Start, then Run (in XP), typing main.cpl, and pressing Enter to open the Mouse Properties dialog box. Find the tab with the touch pad settings. You'll refer to this dialog as you create your shortcut.
To create the shortcut, right-click the desktop or any folder window and select New, Shortcut. In the Create Shortcut dialog, type control main.cpl,,x, (in XP) or control main.cpl ,x (in Vista), with x being the number of the tab with the touch pad setting from left to right, minus one. For example, if your touch pad settings are on the sixth tab of the Mouse Properties dialog box--as it is on my laptop--enter the number 5.
That's the idea, anyway. For some reason, the shortcut I created wouldn't recognize the sixth Synaptics tab in the Mouse Properties. So I had to enter 4 to open the dialog to its fifth tab. From there, I press Ctrl-Tab to move to the sixth tab and then Alt-D to disable the touch pad.
Access the setting to disable your laptop's touch pad in the Mouse Properties dialog box.
(Credit: Microsoft)To access your touch pad controls with a keyboard shortcut, right-click the shortcut you just created and choose Properties. Click in the Shortcut key text box under the Shortcut tab and press your preferred keystroke combination. I selected Ctrl-Alt-T, but you have to be careful not to choose a combination that's already in use.
Give your touch pad shortcut a key combination to open it from your keyboard.
(Credit: Microsoft)Your touch pad needn't be an all-or-nothing affair. On most notebooks, you can adjust its touch sensitivity via a setting in the Mouse Properties dialog box. For example, clicking the Settings button on the Synaptics tab on my laptop opens a dialog box with an option called Touch Sensitivity. I was able to change the default setting--the second-lightest option--to the second heaviest of the six settings.
The Properties dialog box for the Synaptics TouchPad includes a Touch Sensitivity option.
(Credit: Synaptics)Another setting in this dialog lets me prevent the cursor from jumping because of an incidental touch of my palm as I type. In my case, my fingers are more likely to stray onto the touch pad when I'm entering text.
Note that there are lots of free and low-cost utilities that promise to give you more control over your notebook's touch pad and other cursor-control options, but the Synaptics software that shipped with my laptop meets my needs. However, if you're having problems with your notebook's touch pad, updating the driver software might help. Check your laptop vendor's Web site for details.
For the last couple of months, I have been trying to find the source of an intermittent glitch with my notebook PC's wireless connection. I would often lose Internet access when waking the system from sleep mode: the network icon in the system tray indicated "Local only."
Restarting the machine restored the wireless link, but then why use sleep mode at all? After a little trial-and-error (mostly the latter), I decided to check the age of the device driver for the notebook's wireless adapter. Not surprisingly, the driver was slightly older than the machine itself, which I bought last fall.
I found a newer version of the driver on the notebook vendor's site. It took only a few minutes to download and install the update. After restarting the system, I put the machine to sleep by pressing the Windows key, the right arrow, and Enter. When I woke it up by pressing Enter again, the network icon showed a little blue globe in its bottom-right corner to indicate that I had an Internet connection.
That driver update turned out so well I decided to check the other refreshes available for my notebook. I noticed one for the video adapter that was said to fix a problem with streaming Internet videos. Bonus! I decided to call it quits after those two updates lest something goes wrong and I'm left wondering which update is the cause.
Here are a few other driver-update precautions:
Get your drivers from the PC vendor.
System vendors often customize the drivers for their machines. In fact, when I searched for a driver update on the site of the company that made my notebook's video adapter, I was politely instructed to look on the notebook vendor's site for the appropriate update. A link would've been nice, but I'm not complaining.
Stick with updating only the devices that are acting up.
The old "ain't broke-don't fix" rule applies here. Even a two- or three-year-old PC will likely get along fine with the original driver for its hard drive, though a BIOS refresh might be helpful. As in my case, video cards and wireless-network adapters are likely to benefit most from a new driver.
Create a restore point.
Windows XP and Vista will likely create one for you before the new driver is installed, but to play it safe, set one yourself via System Restore and give it a descriptive name just in case you forget when exactly you loaded the update. Do not rely on Windows' Roll Back Driver function under the Driver tab in the Device Manager Properties dialog box. Likewise, run the update's own installer rather than using Properties' Update Driver button.
Don't count on the "Roll Back Driver" option in Windows' Device Manager Properties dialog; create a restore point instead.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Update your drivers one at a time.
As I mentioned above, if you load several updates in quick succession and something goes wrong, it can be difficult to figure out which update is the troublemaker.
You probably don't need to pay for a software-update service.
This is another one for the "ain't broke-don't fix" category. If you've got so much software on your PC that you need a service to track it, maybe you should think about simplifying your life--or at least the tech part of it. Most PC users can manage their software updates on their own, with a little help from the vendors.
You can get your Microsoft Office updates automatically via the Windows Update service, and other major applications offer similar auto-update functions. Likewise, Flash, QuickTime, and other media players can be set to update automatically, as can Firefox and other browsers (IE 7 updates along with Windows). Last month, I described ways to manage Windows Updates and to keep Apple's Safari from being offered as part of the company's iTunes and QuickTime updates.
Earlier this week, I described some Registry tweaks that force Windows to shut down faster. Another weapon in the fight against interminable shutdowns in XP is Microsoft's User Profile Hive Cleanup service, a free download written by Robin Caron.
Some programs and services don't release their connections to Registry keys when a user logs off. This can cause problems when the person tries to log onto another PC connected to the same company network, but mainly it just adds to the time it takes XP to shut down.
Before you can download the program, you have to let Microsoft validate your copy of Windows. (The program also works with Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.) To install the program automatically, you have to have a copy of Windows Installer 2.0 on your system. Otherwise you can install it manually: Open a command prompt (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt), type cd \program files\uphclean, press Enter, type uphclean -install, and press Enter again. The program will start automatically the next time the system boots. Type exit and press Enter once more to close the command-prompt window.
Bonus shutdown-troubleshooting tip
The other day I decided for no good reason that it was time to update my 6-year-old XP system's video driver. I just happened to be visiting my display adapter's entry in Device Manager (right-click My Computer, choose Manage > Device Manager, double-click the entry under Display adapters, and select the Driver tab) and noticed that the driver was almost 5 years old. The fact that the adapter itself was 6 years old never crossed my mind.
(Quick aside: Is six years about as much useful life as you can expect from a PC? This system has been through the ringer since I use it as one of my test machines. But I've got two radios that are more than 20 years old, and they work just fine. Still, it may be time to retire this graybeard before it retires on me.)
I checked the vendor's download site and saw that the company recommended a replacement driver for that ancient model. The lure of free software was irresistible.
After I downloaded and installed the new driver, everything seemed to be working just fine, until I shut down Windows. That's when the PC restarted unexpectedly. I recognized this as a symptom of trouble, and sure enough, when Windows reloaded it ran a disk check. Though the check didn't indicate any disk errors, I was warned that Windows had recovered from a "serious error."
I started the troubleshooting process by stopping the automatic restarts: Right-click My Computer, choose Properties > Advanced, click Settings under Startup and Recovery, and uncheck Automatically restart. The next time I shut down I saw the blue screen displaying the error codes. A Web search of the code confirmed my suspicions, though a bad video driver was only one of several possibilities as the source of this error code.
Uncheck 'Automatically restart' in Windows XP's Startup and Recovery dialog box to view the error code causing the shutdown problem.
(Credit: Microsoft)Using XP's Roll Back Driver option didn't fix the problem, so I chose Uninstall instead. The next time I restarted XP, it started at the video adapter's lowest resolution, but after I readjusted it to the previous setting, the display appeared unchanged. When I reopened the display adapter's entry in Device Manager, it was back to the original driver version, but the shutdown error disappeared, and Disk Check didn't run the next time XP started.
Like they say, don't try fixing what ain't broke.
Monday: backup online for free.
My 3-year-old Hewlett-Packard PC stopped playing optical discs a couple of months ago. Not only were the built-in DVD and CD-ROM drives out of commission, I couldn't even get a brand-new external DVD drive to work. I searched and searched for driver updates, but came up empty. It wasn't until I happened upon a Registry patch on Chris Pirillo's great Lockergnome site that I got the machine to recognize the optical drives.
The patch was provided by a volunteer who had no affiliation with HP, Microsoft, or the drive vendors. It's not uncommon for PC experts to tell people to update their drivers, but I wonder if these people ever look for updates themselves.
Here's another example: I've got a Samsung SyncMaster 170MP LCD monitor that I've been using for going on five years now. It's a great little monitor (though at 17 inches diagonal it wasn't considered "little" when I bought it). Unfortunately, when I upgraded to Vista, I noticed some minor pixel swimming. As PC nuisances go, the dancing pixels are trivial--they're apparent only where a dark window edge meets a light one--but I'd rather they stopped their shuffling.
I just visited the support section of Samsung's site only to find that the company doesn't offer a Vista version of the driver for this model. Nor could I find one at any of the many sites that specialize in device-driver downloads. So I guess I'll have to put up with the pixel sizzle until I collect enough loose change to buy a new Vista-ready monitor.
Rules for avoiding hardware obsolescence
1) Don't upgrade your operating system. If the OS didn't come with the hardware, there's a great chance that an update will render some of your PC's components unusable.
2) Don't expect hardware vendors to support the products you buy from them more than a year after the purchase. In fact, you can't count on much help from them at all after the standard warranties expire. You may get troubleshooting help from other users of the products, however.
3) Before you buy any hardware, find out when it was originally released. I believe all PC components should come with a freshness date. About a year ago I bought a Linksys router that was reviewed favorably by several independent tech sites--when it was originally released 18 months earlier. In the interim, it was found to require a firmware update, but I didn't find out about its outdated firmware until I spent a day and a half trying unsuccessfully to install it on my home network. (After I downloaded the update, it worked without a hitch.)
4) Be careful when you mix and match old and new hardware and software. Replacing the hard drive on your trusty-but-ancient PC with an enormous-capacity drive that spins twice as fast as the old one will work only if the system is capable of supporting the faster speed and higher capacity. You may find it's more efficient to spend the money as part of the cost of a new PC.
5) When all else fails, bug the vendor. Send an e-mail to the company's support address (but don't bother calling the toll-free support number unless you have lots and lots of time on your hands). Detail the problem, and ask for a solution. Just don't expect to be offered one. However, if enough people complain about the same problem, the chances improve that the vendor will actually do something useful, even if it's simply to offer a discount on a replacement.
Wednesday: The first steps toward a New Year's resolution to compute in a Microsoft-less (and Apple-less) world.
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