Wrestling With Computers

[kevin_standlee]

I spent about ten hours today doing Day Jobbe from Fernley. After work and dinner, Lisa and I spent an hour or so chopping and clearing brush from the property. Unlike Mehama, we only have to do this about once a year. We still can't figure out where the plants are getting their water, as we're not watering them.

I had hoped to process and post the photos from UP150 this evening, but instead I got to spend several hours wrestling with trying to find keyboard drivers for the IBM UltraNav keyboard (that's a particular keyboard that's very similar to how the T series laptops are laid out, including an built-in touchpad) so that the keyboard would work on the new desktop computer we got for Lisa. Specifically, we wanted to be able to disable tapping. [Edit: see comment below from me if you don't know what touch-pad tapping means.] Lisa doesn't like tapping. (I don't either.) But the generic keyboard/mouse drivers have it turned on by default and you can't disable it without the device specific drivers.

This task turned out to be far more work than it should have been. I kept searching for drivers and kept getting different sets of them, all from Lenovo's web site. The didn't work. About the fifth set of drivers — astonishingly, the one that claims to be for PS/2 keyboards instead of USB — actually worked, at least enough to get us the advanced settings tab where we could disable tapping.

Comments

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Forgive me. I even did a Google search but came up empty. I've been typing for (mumble-mumble) years but don't know what "tapping" is. (I'm guessing if you don't like it, I probably don't either, but I'd like to know what it is that I don't like.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

If you've never used a touch-pad, you'd never know it. "Tapping" is when you tap the touch pad hard enough (it's an adjustable parameter). The touch-pad interprets a tap as a left-mouse click. Do it twice quickly and you get a double-click.

If you only use a pointing device like a mouse, you'll never even know about tapping. But if you have a touch pad and wonder why sometimes it acts like you've clicked when you didn't, it's probably because the tapping sensitivity is such that it interpreted your touch of the pad as a tap. The Wikipedia article about touch-pads discusses this in more detail.

Some people really like the tapping feature. I do not. Because of the way I use a touch-pad, having tapping turned on often leads to me doing click-drags when I don't want them.

[lindadee.livejournal.com]

I used to love my tap mouse, but my fingertips became so sensitive, I had to give it up. Even clicking a mouse button repetitively can hurt. (But I found some Japanese fingertip protectors that seem to help). These days I use track ball mouse; I use a right-handed one at work and a left-handed one at home in order to equalize the strain and prevent carpal tunnel.

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Ah, of course. I used a laptop briefly some years ago while acting as secretary of a local historical society. I was constantly swiping past the touch pad -- hated it. Someone finally showed me how to turn it off and life became much better. I have no use for touch pads. (Interestingly, a friend is just now learning how to use computers and likes his touch pad, hates mice.)

I'm with you. Thanks!

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Lisa can't use a mouse or trackball at all and very much likes touch pads, but can't stand tapping or any of the other fancy features they've inflicted upon some touch-pads. She wants to use the touch-pad solely as a pointer, not as an additional mouse button or anything else. This is why we went to the extra effort of getting a special keyboard for her new desktop that replicates the layout of her laptop computer. (The new desktop PC is actually an old surplus machine from work that I was able to get for cheap when it was retired; many years ago, it was actually my primary modeling computer. I reformatted it with WinXP down to bare metal and it runs like the wind since there's almost nothing installed on it.)

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Ah! This explains at least some of the behavior of my laptop, which will act as if something's been clicked at near-random times unless I turn off the touchpad entirely. Apparently the tap sensitivity defaults to 'molecule weight' on my netbook.