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My Stupid Touch Screen

crazyporscheman

Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:01:51 pm

Not sure if I should be posting this somewhere else on the forum but I had a frustrating occurrence with my touch screen and Zorin OS 12 Beta which turned out to (at least to me) quite funny..... Let me continue.

Yesterday morning my install of Zorin 12 Beta fired up as usual. I spent the majority of the morning into the early afternoon doing a number of computer related activities. Regular stuff: paid a couple bills, ordered a couple things from Amazon, read the news, checked in with Twitter...the usual stuff. All without any hitches or weirdness from the OS. Again, OS 12 Beta has been 99.9% rock solid for me on this particular machine.

All was going well until I took a break out of my office. Wife and I went out to get a coffee and run some errands and when we left I forgot to close the lid on my laptop. When we got back one of our cats had found a nice warm place to nap.....on the keyboard of my laptop. Cats....gotta love them.....well, really I don't have to (I'm a dog guy) but for the sake of marital harmony, I love cats. You married guys may know what I mean.

Sooooo....I shooed Sam the cat off my keyboard. I noticed my screen was a little greasy plus some small dots from cat sneezes so out to the kitchen I went to grab the screen cleaner. I gave the machine a thorough clean and all was good. About 5 minutes later I sat down and restarted my machine and had some very peculiar behavior being displayed. The mouse cursor was jumping all over the upper right corner of the screen. I thought "Oh great....something is wrong here...." First thought was my rock solid Beta is having issues. Second thought was let's plug in my Ubuntu 16.04 USB stick, restart and see if the erratic pointer persisted...and it did.

c***! My favorite Linux laptop must be having hardware issues, not OS issues. Not a big deal as I have a number of laptops I can use but just a pain in the **** as we are getting ready to head out to Texas for the Formula One event this coming weekend. Have enough to do let alone setting up another machine...oh well.

I moved this machine to the side and got another box powered up and began the install of Zorin OS 9 in preparation for the trip.

Here is where the funny stupidity comes in.....

As I was sitting watching the install happen I caught a glimpse of the screen on the "broken" laptop and noticed that there was cat hair stuck between the screen surface and the bezel.... No....could that dumb-a$$ hair be the reason for my woes?

I pulled the hair out and then re-cleaned the screen....and....to my amazement the erratic mouse pointer movement was cured after powering up...Zorin OS 12 Beta and my old trusty HP machine were just fine.

In closing, after explaining it to my wife, she was nice enough to point out that her otherwise fairly smart, relatively talented, mechanically inclined, tech-savvy husband was brought down by.....cat hair.

Gonna be a long trip to Texas..... And, can someone give me a pointer in how to disable the stupid touchscreen in Zorin OS 12 Beta?

Thanks for reading,
Tim