My favorite kind of computer tips are those that address a particularly common and annoying problem, and solve that problem with a quick solution that’s easy to implement.  And preferably free.  Today is a great example of this kind of computer tip.

It’s a common complaint among laptop users.  The cursor seems to jump around to random places on the page while you’re typing.  If you happen to not be looking at the screen for a few seconds, you look up and you might see that you have typed a few words or even a whole sentence – in the wrong place.

If you don’t know what’s causing it, this problem can be very frustrating because you also won’t know how to fix it.

Having seen this happen many times, I am very familiar with it.  In fact, when a client has a question to ask, and it starts out, “My laptop does the weirdest thing.  I’m just typing along, and all of a sudden…” that’s usually all they have to say because I already know what they are going to tell me.  The cursor moves around the screen to a different spot, seemingly with a mind of its own.

The cause of this issue is the laptop’s touchpad.  That’s the little square under the keyboard with the left and right button.  It’s sort of the “mouse” of a laptop since you can move your finger on it to determine where the cursor is on the screen.

What happens is that while you’re typing, your left hand or your right hand (or both) brushes the touchpad, ever so slightly.  It doesn’t take much at all.  That tells the laptop that you want to move the cursor, so it just does what it’s told to do.  And you end up typing a bunch of text in the wrong place.

There are a few solutions to this:

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• Type more carefully.  Hold your hands up higher so you don’t accidentally touch the touchpad.  This is not really a practical solution.
  
• Disable the touchpad and use a regular mouse instead.  This solves the problem, but it’s not really ideal.  If you use a laptop because its portability, you might not always be in a situation where a mouse can be easily used.
  
• Connect a separate keyboard and type on that instead of the laptop’s keyboard.  This also solves it, but again can be kind of cumbersome in some situations.
  

Recently I came across what I think is the best solution.  It’s a little program called TouchFreeze.  You can download it free here.

When I installed it to try it out, I was happy to see that the download and installation was very simple.  There was no attempt to load any junkware – you just download the file, then run it to install the program.

When you run it, you won’t even see anything change on the screen.  It just runs in the background.  What it does is one thing:  it disables the touchpad – temporarily – while you are typing.  Stop typing, and you can move the cursor around with the touchpad all you want.

There isn’t even a “Settings” menu to bother with.  The only setting is whether or not you want it to start automatically each time Windows starts up.  Since it does just one job and does it well, you will probably want to run all the time.

After installing it, I played around with it by typing with one hand and deliberately tapping the touchpad with the other – and the cursor didn’t move from where it was supposed to be, not even once.  This program is elegantly simple and just does its job.  Highly recommended for anyone using the keyboard and touchpad on a Windows laptop.