Touchpad Picking Up a 'Tap' at the Beginning of a Swipe/Scroll

Hello folks!

When I physically contact the touchpad with one finger to move the mouse cursor, it might click the item that was immediately under the cursor before it begins moving. When I contact the touchpad with two fingers to scroll, the context menu may be brought up as the scrolling begins.

It seems like the touchpad is picking up a ‘tap’ at the moment when my finger(s) makes physical contact with it. I’m sure my finger(s) never left its surface, and the initial landing on the touchpad is solid.

It doesn’t happen every time. And, when I continuously use the touchpad it tends not to happen, the erroneous click is more likely to trigger if the touchpad hasn’t been touched for a bit, such as if I was typing or walked away from the laptop. It does appear this issue will begin to emerge after the computer has been running for a few hours, and a restart can perhaps temporarily mitigate it. I’ll have to pay closer attention to see if this is true, though.

Any ideas on what might be happening? Perhaps certain capacitive sensing threshold of the touchpad is shifting abnormally after long period of power on? Any info is appreciated!

12th Gen, 3.08 BIOS (also happening on 3.05), Windows 11 with drivers.

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Interesting update: I found a way to somewhat reliably reproduce this behavior, with the help of my… hair.

I have a habit of sometimes moving my hair to the front, such as when contemplating an email reply, and subconsciously run my fingers through them just like a brush (if the way I’m describing makes any sense).

I realized by running my finger through a bundle of hair a few times, I can more likely trigger the false ‘tap’ when I go use the touchpad again.

Of course, it seems like the above method is one of the ways to trigger this issue, but far from the only. I tie my hair up and don’t play with it while in public, and this touchpad behavior definitely still occur.

Running on battery, plugged in with ungrounded charger, and plugged in with grounded charger also don’t seem to make a difference from my memory.

Any ideas? Is the touchpad itself just defective, or some isolation issue? I do have another Framework, but it currently doesn’t have any OS installed, so I can only test on that one later.

Update

When it happens, hibernation and reboot can make the issue go away. Already uninstalled touchpad from device manager and reinstalled driver bundle. Potentially defective touchpad with all the info currently present.

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I was having issues with this all of a sudden when I hadn’t had any problems for ages. I thought it might have been some random Win11 update that caused a behavior change, but then I remembered I had installed the Wacom tablet drivers recently. I uninstalled them and suddenly stopped having this issue. Touchpad is back to working as before and not picking up a tap at the beginning of a drag. Not sure if this is the cause for you, but I figured I’d mention it anyway.

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Just want to chime in with exactly the same issue. Intermittently, when I press my finger to the touchpad to move the mouse pointer, the touchpad interprets it as a click and then moves the pointer. Very frustrating.

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After playing around for a couple of weeks, I think Jason_Username_Taken’s observation that hibernation makes the problem go away is correct. Whenever the laptop comes out of hibernation, I don’t have a sliding click problem. However, whenever the laptop comes out of sleep, I am likely to have the sliding click problem. Could the problem be related to the touchpad not properly resetting after coming out of sleep?

Hi @Robert_Mulcahy , sorry for the silent, been busy recently.

Yes, hibernation makes it go away until it happens again. I was also able to observe this issue on Framework 13 with 12th Gen and AMD 7840U. (Two separate FW13s with their own trackpads, not the same trackpad being swapped between two MLBs)

I think the issue could potentially be with the trackpad’s firmware. For the time being, I just disabled tap-to-click.

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Yeah, turning off tap-to-click worked for a while for me, but the right side of the pad started to become unreliable. I think I have at least two problems going on at once: a firmware issue and a hardware issue.

If your touchpad breaks completely and you replace it, let us know how it goes.

Just in case issues are resolved on newer batches of the touchpad.

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That’s a good idea–I may try that.