What to do about floating computer arrow?

This board has helped me quite a bit with my lack of technical savvy. I have an old Dell laptop (soon to get a new one any day now but would like to keep the old one as back-up). For about 3 months now, the little arrow/pointer on the screen tends to float around and sometimes I can't even stop it long enough to click on the area I want to click on. I turn the computer off and start it up again. Do you know what's going on and how I can solve it (it's probably not worth having fixed for $ since the computer is quite old)?

Thanks!

Sounds like a bad track pad. I like to use a real mouse when I can on a laptop. Try one and see if that doesn't cure the problem.

Sounds like a bad track pad. I like to use a real mouse when I can on a laptop. Try one and see if that doesn't cure the problem.

Good diag - and suggestion (all integrated notebook rodent alternatives drive me nutz!).

Somebody (I don't recall who) makes a nice little optical rodent for notebooks with a handy retractable cord. Don't have to worry (with an optical) about carrying aorund a rat pad and keeping rodent ball & guts free of lint & crud.

Also (on the off chance the trackpad isn't actually busted), most notebook rodent alternatives have a calibration / setup facility built into the controlling software. Setup stuff is usually accessible in Control Panel somewhere. Had one (Compaq) with similar symptoms a few months ago that I fixed with recalibration. I'd still invest in an external rodent, but maybe you could buy one of your tech dudes a sub and a beer in exchange for a quick look at the trackpad subsystems. ;-)

Thanks, Kurt and OhioBeachBum. Helpful advice. I'm going to try to keep this old laptop in service as long as I can (I don't like to just throw things out when they're still useful). And our tech people are very good -- the people on graytonbeach.com are simply faster in responding. Now I can go to the tech support people and sound pretty clever with a possible solution...