The crazy cursor update

I finally took the touch screen HP laptop (W-10) to the shop in town. No one
had a answer to the problem online. They did a System Recovery which they
said would remove all crapware. They reinstalled the latest in W-10 and
updated all drivers. They did not charge me anything because the System
Recovery made the LT worse. At least the keyboard worked before. The
onscreen KY works but the mouse has to be used to tell it where to put the
chosen letters. The mouse only works on and off, mostly off.

In Googling today and trying to follow what I'm reading - there is no
Keyboard listed in device manager for that LT. It's as if it never existed.
What happened that it was not installed during the Recovery? The keyboard
and touch pad are dead, the touch screen is dead, the cursor is now stuck to
the Start button a good part of the time.

They suspect it's the mother-board. Any ideas. I don't know where to go
from here. Take it to another repair shop? Try and buy a MB and install it
ourselves. I'd hate to have to recycle it because it's only 13 months old
and my favorite LT.

RHB wrote:

They suspect it's the mother-board. Any ideas

If you use a USB or bluetooth mouse or keyboard, do they work?

no HID devices show up at all in device manager?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Burns"
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-10
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2019 2:22 PM
Subject: The crazy cursor update


RHB wrote:

They suspect it's the mother-board. Any ideas

If you use a USB or bluetooth mouse or keyboard, do they work?

They work on and off.

no HID devices show up at all in device manager?

No. But tonight Keyboards shows up in device manager.

On Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:57:55 -0400
"RHB" wrote:

I finally took the touch screen HP laptop (W-10) to the shop in town.
No one had a answer to the problem online. They did a System Recovery
which they said would remove all crapware. They reinstalled the
latest in W-10 and updated all drivers. They did not charge me
anything because the System Recovery made the LT worse. At least the
keyboard worked before. The onscreen KY works but the mouse has to be
used to tell it where to put the chosen letters. The mouse only
works on and off, mostly off.

In Googling today and trying to follow what I'm reading - there is
no Keyboard listed in device manager for that LT. It's as if it
never existed. What happened that it was not installed during the
Recovery? The keyboard and touch pad are dead, the touch screen is
dead, the cursor is now stuck to the Start button a good part of the
time.

They suspect it's the mother-board. Any ideas. I don't know where to
go from here. Take it to another repair shop? Try and buy a MB and
install it ourselves. I'd hate to have to recycle it because it's
only 13 months old and my favorite LT.



Try Linux Mint or MX Linux on it, and see if you have that cursor
problem.

You don't have to install it, run it from a USB Stick.

RHB wrote:
I finally took the touch screen HP laptop (W-10) to the shop in town. No one
had a answer to the problem online. They did a System Recovery which they
said would remove all crapware. They reinstalled the latest in W-10 and
updated all drivers. They did not charge me anything because the System
Recovery made the LT worse. At least the keyboard worked before. The
onscreen KY works but the mouse has to be used to tell it where to put the
chosen letters. The mouse only works on and off, mostly off.

In Googling today and trying to follow what I'm reading - there is no
Keyboard listed in device manager for that LT. It's as if it never existed.
What happened that it was not installed during the Recovery? The keyboard
and touch pad are dead, the touch screen is dead, the cursor is now stuck to
the Start button a good part of the time.

They suspect it's the mother-board. Any ideas. I don't know where to go
from here. Take it to another repair shop? Try and buy a MB and install it
ourselves. I'd hate to have to recycle it because it's only 13 months old
and my favorite LT.

I usually recommend to people that they make a backup
image of the hard drive, before giving a computer to
a shop for repair.

There have been a few cases, where some trivial problem,
they erase C: and all the user data files, and reinstall
the OS.

*******

You could use the BIOS setup screen as a test case.

UEFI interfaces for BIOS setup, have a GUI. They accept
cursor up and down keys. You can use the Mouse. Maybe
the Touchpad also works in there. This is an example
of an "OS" before the real OS runs.

If you can't do anything, can't get into the BIOS, then
it probably is a hardware problem. It doesn't have to
be "motherboard", which is a way of saying "we don't
know what it is". I remember one shop owner, kept
"blaming the MOSFETs" for every problem under the
sun. Some of these mom and pop shops, have strange
fixations with stuff.

The HIDs have hardware, which is generating signals. It
could be, for example, a problem with the touchscreen
sensor array and the chip in the touchscreen that converts
inputs into USB packets.

The motherboard components might be perfectly happy.
And just the touchscreen is generating a blizzard of
events and the driver doesn't know what to do with them.

It sounds like it's some hardware component, but you'd
need a way to disable them one at a time, and that can
be hard to do and remain in control of the machine.

That's a kind of "fault isolation", where you eliminate
items as being contenders, as you go through the hardware
list.

*******

With a linux LiveDvD or USB stick, you could use (in Terminal)

sudo lsusb
sudo lspci

and see if the basic hardware items are reporting in.

When it comes to Human Interface Devices, they have all
sorts of crazy ways of connecting them. While you would
expect USB to be used, they could be serial or PS/2,
and in some cases, the hardware lacks PNP (plug and play)
information. This also makes it difficult to (safely)
make drivers for the things, because without PNP, the
driver doesn't know if this is the right computer
to be using the driver or not. Let's just hope this
machine doesn't have a "hodge-podge" of bus connections
for this stuff.

Paul

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul"
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-10
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2019 4:16 PM
Subject: The crazy cursor update


RHB wrote:
I finally took the touch screen HP laptop (W-10) to the shop in town. No
one had a answer to the problem online. They did a System Recovery which
they said would remove all crapware. They reinstalled the latest in W-10
and updated all drivers. They did not charge me anything because the
System Recovery made the LT worse. At least the keyboard worked before.
The onscreen KY works but the mouse has to be used to tell it where to
put the chosen letters. The mouse only works on and off, mostly off.

In Googling today and trying to follow what I'm reading - there is no
Keyboard listed in device manager for that LT. It's as if it never
existed. What happened that it was not installed during the Recovery? The
keyboard and touch pad are dead, the touch screen is dead, the cursor is
now stuck to the Start button a good part of the time.

They suspect it's the mother-board. Any ideas. I don't know where to go
from here. Take it to another repair shop? Try and buy a MB and install
it ourselves. I'd hate to have to recycle it because it's only 13 months
old and my favorite LT.

I usually recommend to people that they make a backup
image of the hard drive, before giving a computer to
a shop for repair.

There have been a few cases, where some trivial problem,
they erase C: and all the user data files, and reinstall
the OS.

*******

You could use the BIOS setup screen as a test case.

UEFI interfaces for BIOS setup, have a GUI. They accept
cursor up and down keys. You can use the Mouse. Maybe
the Touchpad also works in there. This is an example
of an "OS" before the real OS runs.

If you can't do anything, can't get into the BIOS, then
it probably is a hardware problem. It doesn't have to
be "motherboard", which is a way of saying "we don't
know what it is". I remember one shop owner, kept
"blaming the MOSFETs" for every problem under the
sun. Some of these mom and pop shops, have strange
fixations with stuff.

The HIDs have hardware, which is generating signals. It
could be, for example, a problem with the touchscreen
sensor array and the chip in the touchscreen that converts
inputs into USB packets.

The motherboard components might be perfectly happy.
And just the touchscreen is generating a blizzard of
events and the driver doesn't know what to do with them.

It's been off for hours and I turned it on a it's working OK. That is
except for the touch screen. That's not working. The touch pad is. But it
doesn't last. Soom the cursor goes wacky and the second cursor appears as a
capitol I while the normal one sticks to the ON botton. Suddenly the
keyboard is working again again - I have i t right next to me here.


It sounds like it's some hardware component, but you'd
need a way to disable them one at a time, and that can
be hard to do and remain in control of the machine.

That's a kind of "fault isolation", where you eliminate
items as being contenders, as you go through the hardware
list.

*******

With a linux LiveDvD or USB stick, you could use (in Terminal)

sudo lsusb
sudo lspci

and see if the basic hardware items are reporting in.

They all seem to be now. When I shut it off earlier no Keyboard showed in
device manager. It shows now. It says it's stadard PS/2 keyboard. The
mouse is a HID-compliant mouse. Touchpad is SMBus.


When it comes to Human Interface Devices, they have all
sorts of crazy ways of connecting them. While you would
expect USB to be used, they could be serial or PS/2,
and in some cases, the hardware lacks PNP (plug and play)
information. This also makes it difficult to (safely)
make drivers for the things, because without PNP, the
driver doesn't know if this is the right computer
to be using the driver or not. Let's just hope this
machine doesn't have a "hodge-podge" of bus connections
for this stuff.

Paul


Do you think this is a hardware problem? Why does it more or less work when
first turned on after a rest period, then goes nuts?

On 2019-08-28 10:20 p.m., RHB wrote:

When it comes to Human Interface Devices, they have all
sorts of crazy ways of connecting them. While you would
expect USB to be used, they could be serial or PS/2,
and in some cases, the hardware lacks PNP (plug and play)
information. This also makes it difficult to (safely)
make drivers for the things, because without PNP, the
driver doesn't know if this is the right computer
to be using the driver or not. Let's just hope this
machine doesn't have a "hodge-podge" of bus connections
for this stuff.

Paul


Do you think this is a hardware problem? Why does it more or less work when
first turned on after a rest period, then goes nuts?

If a clean install didn't work in Windows and the issue appears in
Linux, chances are that hardware is indeed at fault. You said that this
was a Dell machine?

"Rabid Robot" wrote in message
...
On 2019-08-28 10:20 p.m., RHB wrote:


Do you think this is a hardware problem? Why does it more or less work
when
first turned on after a rest period, then goes nuts?

If a clean install didn't work in Windows and the issue appears in
Linux, chances are that hardware is indeed at fault. You said that this
was a Dell machine?

It's a HP machine. It's just so weird because it works fine for hours or
for a few minutes. I never know when I turn it on how long it will work.
That's why the guy at the Shop thought it was an intermitten short in the
mother board. Tonight I couldn't get it to work long enough to download
anything no less Linux. I think I have a copy of Linox on a DVD but trying
to get it to work long enough to download and install Linux doesn't seem
possible. I can try and run it from the DVD drive if I can manage to get to
the DVD drive before it goes bonkers.

The log showed all kinds of errors but went nuts before I could get a screen
shot.

I think I'll download linux on this machine and try and install it on the
sick one.

On Fri, 30 Aug 2019 00:28:22 -0400, "RHB" wrote:


"Rabid Robot" wrote in message
...
On 2019-08-28 10:20 p.m., RHB wrote:


Do you think this is a hardware problem? Why does it more or less work
when
first turned on after a rest period, then goes nuts?

If a clean install didn't work in Windows and the issue appears in
Linux, chances are that hardware is indeed at fault. You said that this
was a Dell machine?

It's a HP machine. It's just so weird because it works fine for hours or
for a few minutes. I never know when I turn it on how long it will work.
That's why the guy at the Shop thought it was an intermitten short in the
mother board. Tonight I couldn't get it to work long enough to download
anything no less Linux. I think I have a copy of Linox on a DVD but trying
to get it to work long enough to download and install Linux doesn't seem
possible. I can try and run it from the DVD drive if I can manage to get to
the DVD drive before it goes bonkers.

The log showed all kinds of errors but went nuts before I could get a screen
shot.

I think I'll download linux on this machine and try and install it on the
sick one.

As others have pointed out, you don't need to install Linux, you just
need to boot Linux.

If that's too difficult, others have also pointed out that you can boot
into the BIOS setup screens and let it sit there, cooking, to see if
similar issues crop up. The whole idea behind these things is to take
your current Windows installation out of the picture long enough to see
whether the problem exists outside of Windows.

These things have been suggested several times already.

RHB wrote:
"Rabid Robot" wrote in message
...
On 2019-08-28 10:20 p.m., RHB wrote:

Do you think this is a hardware problem? Why does it more or less work
when
first turned on after a rest period, then goes nuts?
If a clean install didn't work in Windows and the issue appears in
Linux, chances are that hardware is indeed at fault. You said that this
was a Dell machine?

It's a HP machine. It's just so weird because it works fine for hours or
for a few minutes. I never know when I turn it on how long it will work.
That's why the guy at the Shop thought it was an intermitten short in the
mother board. Tonight I couldn't get it to work long enough to download
anything no less Linux. I think I have a copy of Linox on a DVD but trying
to get it to work long enough to download and install Linux doesn't seem
possible. I can try and run it from the DVD drive if I can manage to get to
the DVD drive before it goes bonkers.

The log showed all kinds of errors but went nuts before I could get a screen
shot.

I think I'll download linux on this machine and try and install it on the
sick one.

On some other machine, download an ISO and either make a DVD
or transfer the file (using "dd") to a USB stick.

You boot the machine with the media you've created.

This is called a "Live" session, because most of what is
being done, is held in RAM. A "good" amount of RAM today,
is maybe 2GB of RAM, to handle a fair number of distros.
Puppy or FatDog might have a smaller footprint.

Your home directory is then mounted on RAM. So /home/ubuntu
is a ramdisk. The /tmp is a ramdisk. When you download additional
software packages, it uses a bit of RAM.

And this is all without zorching any hard drives or installing
anything. As long as you have a bit of RAM to work with,
you're golden.

On some distros, on the boot line, you can add

TORAM=yes

to the end of the line, like this

quiet splash --- # the normal end of line

TORAM=yes # remote the cruft above, add the argument you want

What that does, is if the DVD is 1.4GB, it adds about 3 minutes
to boot time, but it also puts the entire 1.4GB DVD into RAM
too. This makes it possible to eject the DVD, and every bit
of the session is in RAM. A 4GB or 8GB machine makes this practical.

Maybe an 18.3 from here would be good.

https://www.linuxmint.com/download_all.php

18.3 Sylvia

MATE (64-bit)

https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=248

An example of making a USB stick would be

sudo dd if=some.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=2048 # divide power-of-two number into
# size, to make transfer more efficient
# bs=1M is more desirable, if it divides evenly

On Windows, you can use dd.exe from chrysocome.
Run in an Administrator Command Prompt. Run "dd --list"
first to get the device names to use.

(Manual page)
http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip

dd.exe if=some.iso of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 bs=2048

That's the basic procedure for putting a hybrid Linux distro
onto a USB stick. Assumes the USB stick is at least 2GB to
start with (for a 1.8GB ISO). Modern USB sticks are a lot
larger than that, so there should not be a problem.

Cleaning the USB stick later (in Windows) is a bitch :-/
There is a claim that recent Windows 10 versions support
multiple partitions on a USB flash, but I'm not sure that
really helps. Using "diskpart", there is always the "clean"
option, which is likely to work well for MSDOS partitioned
items, but is less likely to help with GPT. Using "clean all"
in diskpart, is a waste of write cycles on the flash, but
sometimes it's the only way to get rid of all traces of GPT
partitioning. The different versions of Windows will have
all manner of discouraging symptoms when working with
USB flash.

HTH,
Paul

On 2019-08-30 12:28 a.m., RHB wrote:
"Rabid Robot" wrote in message
...
On 2019-08-28 10:20 p.m., RHB wrote:


Do you think this is a hardware problem? Why does it more or less work
when
first turned on after a rest period, then goes nuts?

If a clean install didn't work in Windows and the issue appears in
Linux, chances are that hardware is indeed at fault. You said that this
was a Dell machine?

It's a HP machine. It's just so weird because it works fine for hours or
for a few minutes. I never know when I turn it on how long it will work.
That's why the guy at the Shop thought it was an intermitten short in the
mother board. Tonight I couldn't get it to work long enough to download
anything no less Linux. I think I have a copy of Linox on a DVD but trying
to get it to work long enough to download and install Linux doesn't seem
possible. I can try and run it from the DVD drive if I can manage to get to
the DVD drive before it goes bonkers.

The log showed all kinds of errors but went nuts before I could get a screen
shot.

I think I'll download linux on this machine and try and install it on the
sick one.

Overheating would have been my first thought when the computer runs in
such an unreliable way but it is very likely that the motherboard is
indeed an issue. No matter how bad HP computers might be, even with
their low standards it is not normal for things to run that poorly. You
might want to contact the manufacturer directly if the computer is still
under warranty.

Have you tried disabling the touchscreen ?

Jeff-Relf.Me @. wrote:
Have you tried disabling the touchscreen ?

Or for that matter, verifying whether the panel cabling
is plugged in, or a hinge is broken. (Sometimes the panel
RGBCLk cable is in a hinge area, and the two could interact.
The touchscreen cable has to be routed somewhere similar,
like through the other hinge.)

Sometimes connectors "walk out" of a socket. And laptops
are not known for securing things like that.

I had an expensive monitor which developed "sparkling"
artifacts on the screen. I opened it up, took the covers
off the nicely designed PCB chambers in the thing, and
found a connector sort of flopped in its socket.
Pushed it back in, and symptoms... disappeared.
None of the connectors in that design, had retention tabs.
There were no further incidents.

An example of a "retention" feature on a desktop
computer, is the 24 pin power connector. It has a
latch that holds the connector in place, so the
connector cannot do a "thermal walkout". And because
of the power flow in that connector, the connector
could get warm enough to encourage walkout. That's why
it has a latch.

As far as I know, the laptop connectors are the Japanese
kind, and those have no positive retention features. By
stripping all the excess plastic off the ribbon cabling,
the connectors are super-tiny and compact, leaving the
engineer who picked them, a "hero" :-/

Paul

Jeff-Relf.Me@. wrote:

Have you tried disabling the touchscreen ?

I didn't make the mistake of buying one in the first place ...

"Andy Burns" wrote in message
...
Jeff-Relf.Me@. wrote:

Have you tried disabling the touchscreen ?

I didn't make the mistake of buying one in the first place ...



It's getting harder to find them without the touch screen.