IBM was nice enough to issue me a Thinkpad laptop computer when I started working for them six months ago. Well, I hate to bite the hand that feeds me, but this is the quirkiest frickin’ machine I’ve ever used in my life! The Thinkpad has a “Track Point”, which looks like a red pencil eraser sticking up through the keyboard, and is used for controlling the mouse pointer. My current problem deals with scrolling in IE, and only on certain web pages. Recently, when I’ve tried to drag the “thumb”* of the scrollbar to scroll these certain pages, the mouse cursor turned into the “No” sign and I was prevented from scrolling. I could scroll by clicking in the scrollbar above or below the “thumb”, or by clicking on the scrollbar arrows. However, the page only temporarily scrolled. After a half-second pause it jumped back to where it was. When I used the keyboard to scroll, everything worked fine. What’s going on?
By “thumb” I mean the solid part of the scrollbar that you can drag to make the page scroll to a particular position.
My R40 doesn’t do that. Does it always happen? I’ve noticed odd things with the Track Point (sometimes the center button used for scrolling doesn’t work), but usually just closing the computer long enough that I have to log back in when I open it, clears the problem. Does it happen when you use the touch pad?
It doesn’t always do it, and it’s only on certain web pages. I hit one every few days for the past week, but somehow never thought to bookmark one. Next time I will. I’d also forgotten about that middle button. I’ll see what effect that has on the next misbahaving page. I don’t use the Touch Pad because of it’s tendency to interpret touches as clicks. Although this behavior is configurable, disabling it only seems to stifle the tendency, but doesn’t entirely defeat it.
P.S. Thanks to Cheesesteak for the welcome! It’s been an interesting experience so far. I don’t know if I’m experiencing more culture shock from IBM or Viet Nam!
Well, I couldn’t get mine to replicate the problem, my only suggestion is to check the trackpoint settings under the control panel / mouse, and see if anything looks out of the ordinary.
Of course, the company in it’s infinite wisdom stuck me with an old i Series Thinkpad instead of a proper business machine, so there’s a real difference in hardware.
If you find one of those offending pages, bookmark it and post it here, maybe that will help.
Do you have a mouse connected, and is it a PS2 type mouse or a USB mouse?
My Thinkpad (old model circa 1998) has a utility to have the “eraser” mouse disabled when a standard mouse is present. Trouble is that it doesn’t recognize a USB mouse as a mouse; so both mice are “alive” and tend to interfere with each other, often with bizarre unpredictable results.