How I fixed my Dell Latitude's mouse wandering problem

I am the happy owner of a used Dell Latitude C610 laptop computer. It hums away on Windows XP Professional, with 512 MB of RAM and a smallish - 20 GB hard drive. The Latitude battery still delivers over 5 hours uptime at full charge. The monitor screen is crisp and bright and I only paid $250 for it in a computer store. My only gripe has been with the mouse pointer wandering on it's own, at random times, for no apparent reason, sometimes completely out of sight.

I did a little online research on Google and found several forums where other Latitude users were complaining about the same wandering / drifting mouse pointer problems as I had (past tense). I read about some pretty drastic solutions some people have used to stop the drifting pointers, including opening up the case and cutting wires. That sounded like a way-too-drastic way to cure the problem. Other suggestions I saw involved opening the case, lifting the keyboard, then inserting an anti-static hardware bag over a metal clip, which supposedly was rubbing against the touch pad's bottom side.

Then in the midst of all this madness I found one voice of sanity from a user who simply downloaded the newest touch pad drivers for his Dell laptop. I followed up that link to the Synaptics website, where they offer generic drivers for their touch pad devices, but also provided links to each manufacturer who uses their touch pads. Dell was listed, so I went to the Dell support site, followed links and options to get to all available downloads for my Latitude C610, scrolled through the long list and finally found an update for the Dell-Synaptic Touch pad. Bingo!

After downloading and installing the new touch pad driver I rebooted (required). When I logged back into Windows I found a new icon in the SysTray, for the Synaptics Touch pad. I opened the new Mouse/Touch-Pad Pointer Properties and went through all of the new options. One option is to disable the Joystick pointer that looks like a pencil eraser, in the midst of the keyboard, or to change it's sensitivity. I opted to make it less sensitive rather than disabling it, and voila, my drifting pointer problem was gone! No cutting of wires, or inserting of bags under the chassis. A simple software download and a few minutes of configuring the awesome new pointer options and all was well with my mouse pointer, on my Dell Latitude. Plus, I took advantage of other new options in the software and enabled horizontal and vertical scroll zones and tap to click on the touch pad.

If you own a Dell laptop and your pointer is drifting all over the place, visit the Dell support website, or the Synaptics website and download the newest driver for your touch pad and operating system.