Just upgraded my friend's Dell after a full format. She was running WinME and having tons of problems with the touchpad going berzerk on her, jumping to the margins and defying any attempt to control it. She was wanting a new OS anyway, so we installed Win2K from scratch.

We still have the same problem, and it even does it from a usb mouse. I downloaded the latest drivers from Dell's site for this computer and it's marginally better than it was.

I was field testing it in a local coffeehouse and was told by a college student she had the exact same model Inspiron and it acted up on hers. I've heard some gateway laptops suffered the same fate.

Any clues?

If the behavior is seen with two different OSs and the drivers are good, it's probably a bad touch pad.

A work around would be an external touchpad or a mouse.

On some laptops, even when you plug in a USB mouse, the touchpad can still controll the cursor, so you've gotta disable it to stop the mouse acting up.

Zee.

AMD Athlon 2800+ barton @ 12.5 X 176 : 2200mhz
512Mb Corsair RAM
MSI KT6 Delta mobo
Leadtek AGP 6600 gt 128Mb
120Gb Seagate HDD

Mucho gracias...I will give that a whirl. I should mention I did run a Knoppix live-cd (linux) overnight when I had it and did not notice a problem. But I did not use it very much.