Thinkpads Forum

I just received my W540 this week, and it's doing great! However, one small problem, random notepad windows keep popping up. I posted this on the Lenovo Forums, but instead of somebody helping me, somebody deleted my thread. So, I thought I would ask for help here. My W540 is loaded With Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

Thanks!

"Random Notepad Windows" could mean anything... although the best way to pinpoint the problem would be to open up Task Manager and eye the processes for any bloatware or sketchy stuff. You have to be very careful and make sure you don't end any processes that matter to the system or your software.

You can also go to Start Menu, and type "msconfig" in the search bar. Again, be very careful with this Window as changing certain settings in different tabs could significantly affect the operation of your machine. But in this window, go to the "Startup" tab and take a look at some of the processes that run on startup- make sure there aren't any that look out of place.

I had a similar issue once on my W700ds when explorer windows of my WINDOWS/System32 directory kept opening for some stupid reason, and after repeating the above process, I found that some executeable called "BigDog.exe" was the culprit. It's not even harmful, it's just an application used with Lenovo's USB Webcam... but it was still causing the problem (probably due to poor programming or incomplete install) so I unchecked it in msconfig's Startup tab, so it wouldn't start on boot.

Hope this helps... but if you're inconfident in performing the above procedure on your brand new W540 (which I totally would not blame you for at all) then I would strongly advise you to take steps acquiring help from someone you know, or from Lenovo themselves.

Medessec wrote:"Random Notepad Windows" could mean anything... although the best way to pinpoint the problem would be to open up Task Manager and eye the processes for any bloatware or sketchy stuff. You have to be very careful and make sure you don't end any processes that matter to the system or your software.

You can also go to Start Menu, and type "msconfig" in the search bar. Again, be very careful with this Window as changing certain settings in different tabs could significantly affect the operation of your machine. But in this window, go to the "Startup" tab and take a look at some of the processes that run on startup- make sure there aren't any that look out of place.

I had a similar issue once on my W700ds when explorer windows of my WINDOWS/System32 directory kept opening for some stupid reason, and after repeating the above process, I found that some executeable called "BigDog.exe" was the culprit. It's not even harmful, it's just an application used with Lenovo's USB Webcam... but it was still causing the problem (probably due to poor programming or incomplete install) so I unchecked it in msconfig's Startup tab, so it wouldn't start on boot.

Hope this helps... but if you're inconfident in performing the above procedure on your brand new W540 (which I totally would not blame you for at all) then I would strongly advise you to take steps acquiring help from someone you know, or from Lenovo themselves.

Thank you for your post, and suggestions. So far today today I haven't had any notepad windows pop up.

This is what the notepad window looks like:

http://bob-ayers.smugmug.com/photos/i-p ... Xxc-X3.jpg

You may have three finger press enabled for your trackpad.

To disable go to control panel\hardware & sound\devices & printers\mouse\ultranav tab

Go to settings for trackpad

Expand Application Gestures

Click on Three Finger Press

Uncheck the enable box.

If this does not work look at all the gestures. If any are enabled uncheck their boxes too. Looks like Notepad is the default application to start when the listed gestures are deployed.

Brad

Brad wrote:You may have three finger press enabled for your trackpad.

To disable go to control panel\hardware & sound\devices & printers\mouse\ultranav tab

Go to settings for trackpad

Expand Application Gestures

Click on Three Finger Press

Uncheck the enable box.

If this does not work look at all the gestures. If any are enabled uncheck their boxes too. Looks like Notepad is the default application to start when the listed gestures are deployed.

Brad

Thank you Brad! Before disabling the vertical 3-finger function, I tried it and notepad came up, as you suspected. I have now disabled the 3-finger vertical function.

Happy to help.

Brad