touch screen, charging, pointer craziness

[Petter Adsen]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2015 10:36:41 +0200
"Gary J. Kirkpatrick" <garyartista at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Gary J. Kirkpatrick <garyartista at gmail.com
> > wrote:  
> 
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 9:33 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  
> >> On 23 October 2015 at 08:22, Gary J. Kirkpatrick <garyartista at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:  
> >> > I have a number of odd things going on.  Reverting to an earlier kernel  
> >> does  
> >> > not seem to make any difference.
> >> >
> >> > 1) sometimes the mouse pointer drags itself to launcher, which I have  
> >> set to  
> >> > autohide, and gets rather stucke there while it, well, vibrates.  Sits  
> >> there  
> >> > and jiggles.  Most of the time I can drag it back and it resumes  
> >> working.  
> >> >
> >> > 2) I have a touch screen laptop.  After 14 months of working perfectly,  
> >> it  
> >> > will work for a few minutes after a reboot and then refuse to work any
> >> > longer.  Occasionally resetting lightdm gets it going again, but  
> >> usually for  
> >> > just a few minutes.
> >> >
> >> > 3) Sometimes after a reboot or removing the plug, the battery meter  
> >> shows  
> >> > that the battery is discharging.  If I remove then reinsert the plug  
> >> several  
> >> > times it will show it is charging again.  The power supply shows the  
> >> 19.2  
> >> > volts it should.
> >> >
> >> > I doubt these items are related other than they all started happening  
> >> at the  
> >> > same time.
> >> >
> >> > Sometimes it seems to help if I remove all power sources and hold the  
> >> start  
> >> > button down.  Lately that hasn't helped.  
> >>
> >> That sounds very much like hardware.  Does the fan seem to be running
> >> more than it used to?  If so open the back up and give it a good clean
> >> out with a vacuum cleaner.
> >> If that does not seem to help (or even if it does) try booting into
> >> the ram test and leave it going for a few hours to see if it shows any
> >> problems.
> >>
> >> As to the mouse, if it is battery driven then try a new battery,
> >> though hopefully you have tried that already.  Otherwise try a
> >> different mouse.
> >>
> >> Do you see anything in syslog when it starts going wrong?
> >>
> >> Colin

> The pointer issue occurs if am using a mouse or just the touchpad.

You still haven't answered if there is a mouse plugged in when this
happens while you are using the touchpad. If there is, unplug it and
see if the problem disappears.

(From later down the thread:)
> I failed to mention that there does not appear to be a swap partition.  I
> did a LVM install.  I was not worried about it since at first the install
> worked just fine without a  swap.

Can you post the output of 'free'? If you need swap you can always
create a swap file.

> This laptop only provides a 2 minute memory test.  Grub provides no memtest
> option.

Install 'memtest86+'. That should give you a entry in the Grub menu. You
should let it run for several hours, preferably overnight or longer.

Petter

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