Thursday, December 28, 2017

That's not a bug, that's a feature!

I have been having trouble with my Dell Latitude E5580 where desktop icons and documents will occasionally scale down to tiny sizes that are difficult to get back to proper size.

Normally, I dock my laptop and use an external keyboard for typing and a mouse for cursory things..  When I'm on the road, I just plop the computer down on a table.  Yay, mobile computing?

I knew my problems revolved around the Touch pad on the laptop and had experienced similar issues with previous laptops.  I addressed this by disabling the touch pad and using an external wired/wireless mouse and setting the touchpad to disable when the computer detected an attached external mouse.

Today, I didn't deploy my mouse, because I was busy with other projects and hadn't taken the time to retrieve my mouse.

Again, the scrolling and resizing issue reared its ugly head.  Enough!

The first issue is desktop icons have been resizing due to inadvertent touchpad strikes.  It is relatively easy to resize the icons by simply right-clicking on the desktop, selecting view, and then selecting the Icon size - small, medium or large.  But this is a nuisance that I would rather prevent.

Upon researching the issue, I found my my bear-sized thumbs were accidentally hitting the touchpad in such a way that it was creating a gesture used to resize.  I found this article on Microsoft's page.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-desktop-winpc/solution-inadvertent-resizing-of-text-and-icons/905c6d09-97b0-4aac-b85f-7f25b446c812?auth=1

By using this method, you can disable the gestures that are causing problems with item resizing.

In this case, this isn't a bug in software, but rather, unintentional use of a Windows feature.