Touch pad on lap not working moves with finger in air

[hackmole]

My laptop touch pad is not functioning right. I can't control it well and it has become super sensitive.

I find this hard to believe and totally bizarre and I know you will too but it is absolutely the truth. I can put my finger a half-inch to maybe as much as an inch above the laptop touch pad, move my finger around and it will move the cursor in a haphazard way. Same thing if I move my palm over it. No other part of my hand or finger is touching any part of the laptop. I think that is really weird and unbelievable but that is what is happening and I can't explain it except by the standards of the Twilight Zone.

I then tried to plug in a USB optical mouse by "IHome" and it lit up but didn't work. I checked the mouse pad settings and nothing was wrong. Is there any way to fix this or do I have to throw the whole laptop away. I already ran several virus checkers, ran cc cleaner that cleans out the cache and other things and went back to a restore point. Nothing helped.

Maybe someone has had experience with this and can advise me because I have no clue.

 

[boomerang]

HP laptop? I seem to recollect that some of their laptops have this as a feature. Probably a certain series.

 

[Burpo]

I don't like the Synaptic driver. Uninstall it and try using the generic windows driver. You lose the squeeze/2 finger function, but the pad should work like it did. If that doesn't work, it may need a new touchpad..

 

[hackmole]

This is not an HP Laptop. This is a Dell Inspiron 1545 duel core which I think came out about 2009. There is nothing I've ever read that says this computer will work a cursor on the screen by waving your hand or finger over the laptop mouse touch pad without even touching it. It's a bizarre anomaly that I have never heard of anywhere. My only logical explanation I could come up with in my limited knowledge is that it is some kind of electrical short that is causing a magnetic field around the mouse pad which when breaking it by waving your hand over it causes the cursor on the screen to move. That is something like the only possible explanation that I could come up with that makes any sense. Other than that, it might be that I am entering some kind of new dimension where things don't function in the same way as this dimension. If that is the case, then I've broken new ground even more than the Hadron Collider.

The driver it uses is a Windows driver.

Other than noting these strange things, it would be nice to be able to fix it.