$%^&ing-well hate my laptop!
 

Okay.....that was perhaps just a little extreme, but it's really starting wind me up now.

I start typing and everythings just pukka, my eyes drift down to the keyboard and when I look up again, the cursor and therefore the letters i am typing have jumped from where they're supposed to be and are now typing in the middle of one of the previous lines. Often this happens midword. Sometimes it just jumps back a little on the same line.....some times, I think I am still typing and actually the cursor has moved off the text box entirely, theres a sudden couple of clicks as I press enter, thinking I am jumping down a line and bang! I've just gone two or three pages and the post i've been working on has been lost. No amount of using the back and forward buttons can retrieve it, I have effectively deleted the whole thing.

Similar stuff happens when writing emails, or even when just typing a letter, story or poem in Word. I have to check everything five hundred $%^&ing times just to make sure there isn't some bizarre merging of words, or half a sentence inserted in between the first and second half of the word 'yesterday' or somesuch.

I don't know why it does this, I have tried to figure it out. I have studiously typed slowly and watched the keys I am pressing but somehow, I still find the cursor jumps to somewhere else, and I am at a loss as to what I have pressed to make it do that.

I really need to fix my desktop computer. It is so much better than this hunk of junk (yes I know, the problem I described is an operational one and nothing to do with the quality of the machine, but trust me, it's local authority issue therefore it's age can be roughly equated with that of Noah's boat.) I miss my proper computer.

I'm guessing you have a touchpad on your laptop and you are touching it with one of your thumbs as you type. Touching or tapping the touchpad causes a mouseclick in most models and that is repositioning the cursor.

Just a guess.

I know precious little about computers but I assume you've tried to defragment your hard drive, allot more RAM to the program, wipe out your preference folder if it's a Mac. After that, I usually throw myself upon the mercy of the cellar's combined awesomely majestic computer wisdom.

*Bows in proper wayne and garth fashion* I am not worthy, etc. repeat as needed.

Yeah, I thought that, but even when I was being really really careful not to, it still happened. I'm bemused.

See? Dar512 beat me to it.

3f, my desktop computer got fragged by a bunch of spyware programmes. Now all I get is big fat warnings. The virus software can't seem to get rid of it. I have saved my documents now I just need to get around to wping it and reinstalling windows.

That is why I love computers. They really save us so much time...

Combined Cellar Awesomely Majestic Computer Wisdom:

If you must run Windows, don't run IE. At all. Firefox is your friend.

Don't install software that might have adware/spyware in it. Even if it's free.

Don't click on cute stuff your friends send you. Especially in IMs.

Don't use Outlook. At all. Thunderbird is your friend.

Avoid HTML formatted email. Even if it's prettier.

Combined Cellar Awesomely Majestic Computer Wisdom (con't):

Use extreme caution restoring your documents; some of them may be virus infected.

Good advice Maggie)

I wonder if what you're seeing might be the action of a badly-written or defective keylogger? This is a piece of spyware that records what you type and saves it to send of to someone else in the hope you've typed some account numbers or passwords that will be useful to a criminal somewhere.

Hmm....possible. But it's done it from day one of getting the laptop, even before I took it online. It was wiped and everything installed from scratch before they assigned it to me.

Oh. Hmmm. Possibly loose internal electrical connections to the keyboard. Weak springs under the arrow keys. A remote possibility of loose debris stuck under the keys, although that usually results in missing keystrokes rather than extra ones.

- If you connect to the net whatsoever, you must completely and constantly update whatever OS you are running, Win, OSX, or Linux with the vendor's patch system, and never run an OS that is unsupported.

- If you don't know *exactly* what it is, you can't click on it at all. This not only includes things in your browser, but also email (obviously), and, really, everything in almost every application, including and especially things on your desktop.

- If it promises to fix your system, and you click on it, just give up and reformat your hard drive.

Also good advice: ) Thanks