Happy Holidays!
As you may know, I'm in Colorado for the holidays this year, visiting with the family. If you've never been here, the air is extremely dry, especially in the winter. And dry air makes a great breeding ground for static electricity. Coming from humid Oregon, I'd pretty much forgotten about that fact. Until this morning, when I touched the trackpad on my 12" PowerBook G4 and watched a very large, very bright spark travel between my finger and the pad. Zotttt!
Immediately, the trackpad was rendered next to useless. The cursor was generally restricted to a square area of about 200 pixels in the top left corner of the screen--though I could occasionally coerce it into other locations. Knowing what little I know about electricity (stay away from it!), I thought for sure I'd fried some key electronic part that controlled the track pad.
Nonetheless, I tried my usual first troubleshooting step--a restart. While things changed a bit, the trackpad was still basically unusable. I could drag it all over the screen, but only in huge jumps. When I lifted my finger, the cursor would jump to some other spot on the screen. I was now pretty convinced I had a hardware issue.
Then I remembered that I had SideTrack, the replacement trackpad driver, installed. SideTrack is such an essential piece of software for me that I had totally forgotten I had it installed. In the 'why not try' category, I downloaded the newest version and installed it. One restart later, and...presto...I once again had a fully-functional trackpad.
So the question of the day for any of you technical types is: How could a jolt of static electricity permanently affect a software application? It seems very odd to me, especially given that SideTrack isn't the kind of thing (I wouldn't think) that would be writing anything permanent to disk (which might get scrambled by a shock). Any ideas?
Hmm. I had the hugest set of problems with my iBook G3 in the wintertime. I had to make sure I grounded myself out before touching the case. If I zapped it at all, the fan would spin up to full speed (probably around 10,000 RPM or so), and only a restart would fix it.
As for the trackpad...it's possible the new SideTrack version included another initialization method for the trackpad, clearing out the error and resetting the hardware. It's also possible that in the process of loading a new driver into software, it reinit-s the hardware, thus resetting it in a way a restart did not. I'm also making this up, but it's a decent guess.
I'll go with Christopher's answer. Sounds good to me.
Christopher, I'm glad to see you report this issue on the iBook G3 as well - I had thought it was just me! Just as you describe, a static shock on the trackpad would send the fans into permanent overdrive until the next restart.
It could have zapped some kind of firmware in the trackpad that sidetrack ignores. Third party drivers are known to ignore things like that, as they can be buggy and are sometimes the only reason why anyone would use a third party driver in the first place. This also allows support of devices not regularly supported (e.g. VueScan). Just a guess.
Sadly, my computer hardware knowledge is a bit more limited than I would like but I have an inquisitive mind. I'm wondering if now uninstalling Sidetrack will cause the problem to return. This might reveal if the trackpad or Apple's driver is permanently fried or if something has been reinitialized. By the way, the air in Calgary is nearly as dry as the air in Colorado. I use a USB mouse with my Powerbook so I've shocked my spacebar multiple times as I wake my computer from sleep and have forgotten to ground myself. So far, I haven't had any ill effects.
While I've not yet had the experience of the large arcing shock with my PowerBook, I have had odd trackpad behavior now that the weather has turned cold and static has become a problem. I've found that recently when I return to my desk and first try to use the trackpad I'll have behavior like a cursor that won't move, or the two-finger scroll when I only have one finger on the trackpad. I dug up an Apple tech doc that suggested reseting the trackpad, and that has consistently worked for me. I don't remember the specific doc it was in, but the procedure is to place the palm of your hand on the pad to cover it completely, hold it there for about a 3-count, and then remove it smoothly.
I'd wager that the software reinstall was a red herring. I know the first restart didn't solve it, but I still think it's a combination of your attempts to use the pad helping remove some of the static electricity, and the restart. Maybe the first restart was pretty quick, and the second restart was after you'd been trying to make it work for a bit?
I've solved this symptom with the palm-on-pad method a few times — it's never happened on my iBook, but one of my customers has a dry, staticky office and lots of Dell trackpads.
I had similar poroblem, about a year ago just 3 days after I'd bought the new PowerBook. Here in Siberia the winter air is pretty dry and static electricity is a must have;-) So after axactly the same situation with finger lightning the trackpad became crazy. Reboots did not help. So I left the the PB alone till the morning. And to my excitement the problem went away by itself.
I agree with many of the above comments in that it was likely a calibration type issue. Likely the static shock wacked out the calibration so that hardware initialization was required.
The first restart didn't fully reset the 'digitizer' or whatnot, but the second one did. This is kind of like when zapping PRAM most people hold the keys down for a full 3 zap cycles, in case the first one or two don't fully zap it properly.
It is also possible that in installing the new version of SideTrack that it forced a hardware initialization to make sure it and the hardware where properly calibrated.
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