T61 doesn't always enable touchpad/track point at start up

[Wind_Rocker]

It is hit or miss whether or not I will have control of the cursor when I boot up. When the cursor first appears in the center of the screen it may not move using the touch pad or track point stick and when the login screen appears, I have no choice but to reboot and try again. If I can get past that point, the laptop will work as it should forever, until I shut it down. The keyboard usually works but there have been times (few) when even the keyboard was dead.

It is also interesting that when the problem occurs, the laptop begins shutting down as soon as I hit the power button, no 4 second wait, says "saving settings" etc. and shuts down.

It is my work laptop, running XP Pro, I can turn it in to IT and get it repaired or replaced but if there is a simple fix (I know, big IF) it would save some hassle. IT has never seen this problem before, over the phone I was instructed to remove and replace the battery and that didn't help. Even a remote scan of my system turned up nothing amiss.

I did load a bunch of stuff from the Lenovo site, power mgt, access connections etc. and that did not seem to start the problem, just slowed down the boot process so much I was forced to get rid of alll that. Seems like the problem started shortly before or after the big uninstall, can't really remember. Tried system restore, no successful restore to the points I select?

Thanks
David

[pjk]

It is hit or miss whether or not I will have control of the cursor when I boot up. When the cursor first appears in the center of the screen it may not move using the touch pad or track point stick and when the login screen appears, I have no choice but to reboot and try again. If I can get past that point, the laptop will work as it should forever, until I shut it down. The keyboard usually works but there have been times (few) when even the keyboard was dead.

The CEO of my main client has a T61 with a similiar problem and it's driving me nuts. Most of the time we have to plug in an external mouse to make it usable.

One interesting idiosyncracy in our case is that sometimes if you click the right mouse button first, the left button starts working. In our case the problem seems mostly to be the button actuation more than mouse cursor movement.

Another important datapoint I just discovered yesterday - very similiar problems under linux as well as XP. So this is looking like some sort of hardware issue.

I also tried updating/reinstalling the trackpoint driver/utility under Windows, to no avail.

[bhtooefr]

Have you tried removing the keyboard and reinstalling it? Could be a loose electrical connection there...

[pjk]

Have you tried removing the keyboard and reinstalling it? Could be a loose electrical connection there...

Actually the keyboard was recently replaced by me, but A) I'm very careful about ensuring the cables are securely attached and B) the problem preceded the keyboard replacement.

Thanks for the idea though, it's definitely one possibility.