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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I hate laptop keyboards. The problem is the touch pad in front of it. Inevitably, my palm will brush against it, and the software will assume I'm clicking on something, and something random will happen.

It's not just me, others will sometimes ask me what the hell happened, I was typing away, and the window disappeared (or some other random thing happened), and I say "you brushed against the touchpad".

It's so bad that when I travel, I throw a full size usb keyboard into my luggage and plug it into my laptop.

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> The problem is the touch pad in front of it. Inevitably, my palm will brush against it, and the software will assume I'm clicking on something, and something random will happen.

Has that ever happened on MacBook? It seems that better hardware and software, Apple has completely eliminated that issue.

Happens to me on latest MacBook pro from time to time. Note that it's a touch event rather than a click event, but I like having the touch event set up for any occasions where frequent clicking would be too noisy, for example. I've got used to it so I can avoid it more now but, especially at first, the sudden jumping of a cursor in a text editor whilst programming is very frustrating.

on debian systems you can do

    syndaemon -i 1 -K -d

where the number after the -i option is the number of seconds to disable the touchpad for while typing.

Macs don't really have a problem with it.

> my palm will brush against it, and the software will assume I'm clicking on something

There should be palm rejection options available, or options to turn off touch pad clicks in the touchpad driver software. Most OEMs use Synaptics, you can download the latest driver software directly from their site, it may give you more options than you currently have available.

Buy a laptop with a pointing stick and disable the touchpad (if one exists); Thinkpads are most known for having one but other manufacturers also have one on some of their laptops.

Never had a problem with it, both on WinXP from 2001 to 2008 and with Ubuntu since then. I never changed the default settings. All just worked. They've been all HP laptops.

This is the single reason why I refuse to buy anything but MacBooks. I suggest you give them a try, because this problem is eliminated on the Apple ecosystem.

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