I have seen this behavior in a machine with a bad keyboard... It's
caused by a buffer overflow that causes the packets from the mouse to
get offset by one.
If you have another keyboard around I'd give that a try, or borrow one
or buy a cheap one (you can probably pick one up for around $10 US).
Certainly it's less expensive than a new computer or even an hour of
some technician's time.
Good luck;
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of michele sayer
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 8:02 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Is my computer ready to die?
Hi, I wonder if anyone has any ideas for my problem, preferably without
spending any money, because I don't have any.(Well, not at the moment,
anyway!)
The problem is this:
I'll switch the computer on, it'll be fine for ages, then, suddenly, the
mouse pointer will start jumping around the screen, opening up all
different sorts of things, sometimes shutting the computer down. It
seems to be worse if I try to take control of the mouse pointer, I don't
know if thats just a coincidence, but I've got to the stage now where
I'm best off just leaving it to do it's thing until it's stopped. Then,
it's usually fine for ages again.
It happened again this morning, but this time, the monitor turned off as
well, and wouldn't turn back on again.
I did the obvious things, like check the fuse in the plug, but every
time I unplugged the monitor and plugged it back in, it lit up for about
half a second, then went off again.
Obviously, I needed to turn the whole system off, but as I was working
blind, it had to just be unplugged without shutting down.
I left it for an hour or so, then restarted, and it seems fine again.(On
start up, it scanned for errors, but I expected that anyway, that's
normal procedure after power failure)
It has been playing up off and on for a while now, and a couple of weeks
ago, I took the casing off and removed all the dust from inside. To tell
you the truth, I don't know how it had been working, the fans were so
clogged with dust, they could hardly move.
It was fine after that, until yesterday, then again today.
Is there anything else I can do?
I appreciate that sooner or later I will have to replace things, but I
don't really want to spend money until I have to.
The computer is:
Tiny
Pentium 111 processor
451 MHz
128 MB Ram
(adapter) NVIDIA RIVA TNT
Help!, as I was writing this email it happened again! (I'm suprised I
was able to carry on writing this)
Michele (I need advice asap!please!)
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