Toshiba Satellite P55W-C5200X touchscreen ghost

[timeshifter]

Looks like someone is pressing the touchscreen in the lower right hand side of the screen, near the vertical edge. One or two points seem to be activated. Sometimes the screen tries to scroll too. Makes the machine nearly unusable as the touches pull your cursor from it's focus to the edge of the screen.

It doesn't always do it.

I had uninstalled and reinstalled the touchscreen drivers using Device Manager. Thought I'd fixed it.

Customer said it started up almost right after they got it back.

I've got the machine again. I noticed it once since I've had it back. May have been after a sleep cycle. But since then I've not been able to reproduce the problem. I've tried playing multiple YouTube videos in different tabs, opening Office and other things too. Letting it run overnight.

COOL: while I'm typing this I was able to see the problem again. I had closed the lid while running to flip it over to get model number for this post. When I opened it up had to press the power button to wake it up. Maybe that's the trick.

Note: recovering from that glitch is tricky. Imagine if someone keeps clicking a mouse when you're trying to even restart.

This time I got it to stop by, CTRL + ALT + DELETE... hit the power symbol in the bottom right of the lock screen and arrowed up to Sleep. Coming back out of sleep and it's fine again

There's a few things I want to try, but I need to be sure I can make it act up. I've already sent it out once not fixed.

In Device Manager, Mice and other pointing devices, Synaptics SMBus TouchPad my only options were to Update driver or Uninstall device. I thought it was odd that I couldn't just disable it. Anyway, this is what I uninstalled / reinstalled previously. No I notice that I missed the Human Interface Devices - HID-compliant touch screen. That I am able to disable.

Anyway, they're OK if I disable the touchscreen. But it would be nice to keep it if it's just a software bug or Windows glitch that a nuke and pave might fix.

Again, I mainly concerned with reproducing this behavior. Then the fix can be sent out in confidence.

Any ideas?

 

[MichaelBits]

Have you tried flexing or moving the screen around a lot to see if it causes it to happen?
Did you remove the bezel around the screen?

The reason I ask is because I've seen where things get lodged in the screen bezel and can cause ghost touches along the edge.

I don't like troubleshooting touchscreens. Usually a very intermittent problem and hard to track down. I've only had one be a driver issue. All other ghost touches I've encountered it was usually an issue with the touchscreen itself.

 

[timeshifter]

Have you tried flexing or moving the screen around a lot to see if it causes it to happen?
Did you remove the bezel around the screen?

I did try some of that flexing and moving it around but wasn't able to effect anything. I didn't remove the bezel of do anything with the screen itself. In fact it doesn't really have a bezel. Visually it does have a border, but the screen is a solid piece of glass from edge to edge.

 

[backwoodsman]

Do they actually use the touchscreen? Most I've seen that have them, don't. If they won't miss it, the cheapest fix might be simply to disable it.

 

[timeshifter]

Do they actually use the touchscreen? Most I've seen that have them, don't. If they won't miss it, the cheapest fix might be simply to disable it.

Yep. Done that on a few in the past and they're OK with it.