Hi on my laptop every now and then it switches windows similar to what would happen if I use alt-tab. Anyone know how that could possibly happen? I mean it seems unlikely that the alt and tab keys could trigger themselves simultaneously by themselves.
Well on my PC there’s a button with the windows symbol on it that does that whenever I accidentally brush it. It activates the Start Menu apparently.
You have a mouse or keyboard macro set up for Alt+Tab?
Do you have Windows 8? Clicking in the upper left hand corner can sometimes magically switch programs.
Hi i’ve got Windows 7 and an Acer laptop. I use a touchpad rather than a mouse.
Not as far as I know
The Windows key does the same thing as Ctrl-Esc - it toggles the Start menu. That’s not the same as alt-tab… (BTW if you hold alt and tap the tab key it lets you see all of the running programs)
Check your touchpad settings. Sometimes there’s a swipe gesture that switches programs?
I can’t find the touchpad settings. It seems that it doesn’t support multi-gestures:
It only seems to support tap to click and that’s all.
I’m not sure what you mean by “doesn’t support multitouch”. The page you linked to gives examples of several kinds of multitouch gestures that Acer touchpads can handle.
Even if you have a laptop that didn’t support multitouch and multitap when it was originally purchased with a prior version of Windows installed, the touchpad is almost certainly capable of recognizing more than one finger – your drivers just didn’t know what to do with it. I have a Toshiba who was strictly a one-finger beastie until being overhauled into a Linux laptop. Vista had no idea what I was doing with two fingers on the pad, but Ubuntu recognizes two-finger scroll, flick scroll, etc etc etc. If Acer auto-updates its drivers without notification, I suppose it’s possible that your laptop has suddenly discovered what to do with more than one finger at a time, and Windows has applied a bunch of default settings without bothering to tell you.
Some drivers will also let you assign specific actions to tapping on the corner of the touchpad with just one finger. I have the bottom left corner of mine set to open the Start menu, for instance. Some of them are fairly complex; on mine, scrolling using the right edge of the touchpad and then drawing tight clockwise circles will scroll continuously down a long document at high speed, without having to lift your finger off the pad. Touchpads can be sensitive enough to detect fingers that aren’t quite touching the surface – and sometimes other inductive things, like headphone wires – so if your hands hover close to the keyboard while typing, you may inadvertently activate two-finger gestures without actually having two fingers ON the pad surface at the time.
You can check to see if one of these has been set to “switch program” by opening the Start menu, then clicking on Control Panel. The “Mouse” icon will bring up a window with a bunch of tabs at the top. If your laptop has a Synaptics touchpad (which Google suggests that a lot of Acers do), the last tab on the right will have a red icon and say “Device Settings”. Down at the bottom of that tab, the button labeled “Settings…” will take you to the Synaptics menu with all of the multitouch, gesture, and corner macro settings in it.
I’ve got a model KAVA0 Aspire One Pro. It seems to be from 2009.
I’ve tried doing multi-touch gestures on the laptop but they don’t work.
In the Mouse properties it says for hardware it is “PS/2 Compatible Mouse” even though I don’t use a mouse. It says location: plugged into PS/2 mouse port. BTW someone installed Windows 7 for me and it didn’t include an special Acer software.
Does this happen when you are not touching the machine at all? Or only while you are using it? If the latter, my guess would be one of your alt keys is sticking, and when you hit tab it registers as alt-tab - something like that.
Has this always happened, or only since some change or update?
I’m not sure but it might happen with certain key presses or possibly touchpad events. I think it has only happened for the past few months. It happened a few minutes ago but usually only happens every couple of hours. I didn’t use tab the last time it happened. It isn’t really related but it is a small laptop with a 10 inch screen. Sometimes I accidently tap the touchpad while typing and it moves the cursor and makes me type in the wrong spot of some text.
BTW I use alt-tab a lot on the laptop. Maybe it got cached or something and made it happen a few seconds later.
It just happened again. It switched over to a firefox window by itself. Maybe it just switched automatically when the window had loaded the content which sometimes takes a few seconds.