Cyber-exorcism?

[hrj]

My laptop is possessed. Not the new MacBook -- the work laptop that I brought home to crunch through my Big Project Report this weekend. (Nobody asked me to -- it was just taking so long to get everybody's contributions formatted consistently that I figured I'd better do it on my own time, since I was the only one who cared about the report being "pretty". Well, I'm the only one who admits to caring, anyway.)

Now, I've used this laptop in undocked form before and it's never been this weird. I have a Word document open and it's as if random commands are being clicked without my taking action. The view switches randomly between page-view, normal-view, and outline-view. The paragraph I'm working in gets spontaneously changed to a new stye format ... or gets turned into a bullet point. Pull-down menus pop open all by themselves. A new blank document appears. And this stuff wasn't only happening when I was typing and mousing -- it happened while I was just sitting there with my hands not touching the machine.

Odd. Very odd. I finally gave up, saved the key files off on a thumb drive and moved them over to the MacBook. If I'd known I was going to have to do that, I would have just brought them home on the thumb drive in the first place. (I'd prefer not to have work files on my personal computer on general principle, which is why that wasn't my first choice.) Well, it'll make it easier to get the work done since I won't have to deal with the little joystick-nub thingy on the work laptop.

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

2 things...

If it has a touch pad, the pad may be over sensitive and picking up your hands and fingers moving over it.

Does it have bluetooth? It could be picking up seperate keyboard or even a neighbors.

More likely the touch pad.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

Make sure you run an updated spyware/anti-virus as well.

S

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Does your work laptop have mice on its keyboard? (One the little eraser and one used my moving your finger on a flat section?) The flat mouse may be over sensitized, so it thinks it's being used. You can get rid of one of the mouse controls via the control panel so this stops.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

No touch-pad, just the little annoying joystick-nub. No bluetooth. The only other oddity was that it seemed to be accessing the hard drive continually.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'd worry about that more if this were happening at work where it's on the network. This was happening when it wasn't connected to any external network at all. (I'm not even sure it has a wireless card.)

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

If it's modifying the document, one would expect it to access the hard drive to store the changes and undo information in virtual memory.

If it were my computer, I'd try disabling the joystick-nub and plugging in an external mouse. If that solved the problem then it would probably be a mechanical fault in the joystick mechanism or associated buttons. (Of course, if it were my computer I would have disabled the joystick-nub long since. I am not a fan of pointing devices I can accidentally bump while typing.)