Solved Mouse goes to edge of sceeen. Not practical to select anything

[Rincewindwiz]

toshiba tecra M10, touch pad and pointing device
Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit all latest updates


I have just fixed a broken screen on an old Toshiba Tecra M10.
Everything works fine except the touchpad / pointing device
The mouse pointer worked OK for a bit. Then kept moving to the top right of the screen
Then after 10 minutes or so, moved slowly to the bottom left of the screen and is now very hard to move
Its not possible to make it visible with the touchpad
I can just get it to appear when pressing hard sideways on the pointing button
The buttons work fine

An external wifi mouse shows the same problems (but you can make the pointer visible with a sharp slide of the mouse but the pointer goes immediately back to off screen bottom left)
A wired USB mouse behaves the same as the wifi mouse
Device Manager->Update driver says the installed driver is the best one

I then did a windows update of all the missing stuff which changed things slightly as the cursor now goes to the top right instead of the bottom left!! And it is now not possible to get the cursor to move from the top edge but it will go about halfway across to the left

USB wired mouse and wifi mouse also head for the top right but can be made to move anywhere on the screen (but immediately head for the top RH corner) rendering them useless

All of this suggests its a software problem but which software and how do I fix it?
TFAI

 

[BrainDamage]

My guess is the culprit is the touchpad and/or its driver. It could be an out of date driver, or the touchpad could be kaputt

If you have multiple mouse devices enabled at the same time (including touchpads/trackpads), they work simultaneously. If you have some time to kill and some spare USB mice, plug them all in the same computer and see what happens This means that if the trackpad is generating phantom "user is moving the mouse" events, the mouse pointer will be moved regardless of whether another (non-moving) mouse is plugged in or not.

The solution is to plug in a working mouse first (if you don't do that and this doesn't work, you'll have to navigate the menus again with keyboard only), then go to Control Panel > Mouse > Hardware tab, find the trackpad device, then go to its properties and disable it.

 

[Rincewindwiz]

thx for the suggestion of disabling the touchpad.
BUT
After a several hours and several reboots, I wrote the post above. This morning I rebooted, the cursor started top right , wandered down to bottom left and then worked perfectly. In the expectation that this might be a temporary phenomenon, I hastily uninstalled the touchpad (disable was not available) and regretted it when the touchpad continued to work perfectly.


Fortunately, after the reboot, the mouse pointer continued to behave impeccably. So the cause of the original problem remains a mystery. If it recurs, I will remember your suggestion.
Thanks

 

[BrainDamage]

Glad it worked out for you

 

[Rincewindwiz]

Glad it worked out for you

Spoke too soon. Problem is back.

After some reboots it works for for a while on other occasions the mouse is almost unusable from the start.
Even when usable initially, performance decays and the mouse disappears top right or bottom left of the screen and is often almost impossible to get it back.

so following your suggestion, I disconnected the touchpad and the problem went away. So it looks like a new touchpad
Thanks again