<p>Please help me with this issues! I’m too tired to Google it on my own 
… I’m sure the collective wisdom of CC has dealt with something like this in the past! I’m using DH’s home laptop this week, and now and then, the cursor would suddenly jump to a random position on the screen, so if I’m not paying attention to what I’m typing, I end up typing gibberish. Occasionally, it would highlight a random chunk of text, and if I press a key, the highlighted text would disappear as if I’m typing over it. Arrrgghh! The cursor jumping happens with any typing, not just CC. I’m not touching the built-in mouse, and I’m very careful about putting my wrists next to it - it does not seem to help. It is a cheapo Dell laptop, an Inspiron. It never happens on my Dell Inspiron laptop. Any easy ways to eradicate the gremlins out of my keyboard? I’m tired of making too many typos! Thanks!</p>
<p>I get behavior like this when I am using an external mouse but haven’t disabled the touch pad. With my Dell, I hit F9 to turn the touch pad on and off. This probably isn’t your issue since you’re being careful, but your description sounds so much like my problem it may not hurt to try the F9 trick.</p>
<p>ETA – It’s function-F9, not just F9.</p>
<p>Thanks, Indiana, I will give this home remedy a try!</p>
<p>I got the problem too.
Dell laptop, no mouse-using tpad.
Virus?</p>
<p>My son’s dell laptop was also having this problem. When I looked at it, it did not have the appropriate touchpad driver, it seemed to be using a microsoft mouse driver. I downloaded the latest driver for the touchpad from dell and since he usually uses a usb mouse we were able to turn off the touchpad when the usb mouse is plugged in. This was done through the control panel and could only be done after I had gotten the touchpad driver. His laptop is using Windows 7 and I think that perhaps the touchpad driver for Windows 7 was not available when his laptop was shipped which is why it had the generic driver. I believe that even when he does not have his mouse plugged in, the erratic behaviour is no longer a problem because he can adjust the sensitivity settings on the touchpad now.</p>