Iconia 6150 ghost click

power4things

The Iconia 6150 dual-screen laptop "ghost click" has been one of the biggest "hot butttons" on this site.  It's so famous, it's "in-famous".   I have one, and I love the machine.  It's a gorilla-glass-and-gold work of art, top-manufactured piece of gear; build quality is swiss-watch.  Opening the case is like lifting the hood of a Ferrari, best tool-free laptop layout in history. There's even an empty full-length mini-PCIe slot, plus the WiFi takes up another half-mini PCIe, just waiting for your new Intel WiFi 802.11ac card upgrade.  

 

I "souped it up" with 8Gb and a fast Samsung SSD.  I even considered an i7 upgrade but there's not much boost in performance, and heat’s always an issue. Three beefs:  no built-in SD-card reader (supplied USB dongle doesn't count), screen rez at 1366 is a bit low, and pretty heavy to carry.  But, no matter, love it.

 

But, it has sat on a shelf for years because of the ghost-clicking.  It not only affects the screen, but locks up the virtual keyboard, the CPU goes to afterburners, my gadget CPU and RAM meters peg and the fan starts running a marathon. I watched the Task Manager Services a few times while this was going on, and after a few forced Win 7 restarts, this hinted that a "restart" of the virtual keyboard is just likely the culprit.  

 

I fixed it, sort of (or at least scared it into hiding), through the Windows 7 Component Services settings for Touch Monitor, Touch Engine, and (just for fun) PC Tablet Services.  No duct tape on the screen, no hard drive re-wiring, no grounding the screen and case, no killing the keyboard app, no tinfoil.  Not even sure how I figured it out, just horsing around (like so much great science).  It's not really a cure, but it makes the symptoms go away.  The cure would be an updated virtual keyboard driver, which is sadly not likely to be posted now by ACER on a way-legacy product.

 

All you do (so the man said) is go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Component Services (Windows 7, remember).  Double click on Component Services and a new window opens.  Scroll down to "Services (Local)" and click.  The center pane shows a long list of services.  Alphabetize them if they're not already.  

 

In the "T's" are all three of these guys:

 

"Tablet PC Input Service" (Microsoft-provided)

"TouchEngineServices" (Acer-provided)

"TouchMonitorServices" (Acer-provided)

 

Find these three services (they're close to each other on the list), and right click on each one.  In the pulldown, first click "Restart" to correct the badness for the moment (or restart in the first pane).  Takes about 3 seconds for each to restart.  Right click the others, in turn, same drill.  Your virtual keyboard will duck and reappear when "Touch Monitor" is restarted, only now it works.  For the moment, at least.

 

Next, to make it stick, right click each one again, and click on "Properties", and in the dialog box that pops up, under "General", make sure the startup type is "Automatic".  Except, I set the "TouchMonitorServices" (which controls the keyboard) to "Automatic (Delayed Start)" so it would not trip over the driver rush at Windows bootup.  Next, click the tab for "Recovery".  Set all THREE failure events to "Restart the service".  Change "Restart service after" to "0" minutes, and finally, tick the box for "Enable actions for stops with errors".  Repeat for the other two services.  That's all.  Click "OK" and close all the screens each time.

 

I wrote a macro for Autoexec.nt so it performs the Component Services "restarts" at Windows bootup, since the machine frequently starts the day already locked-up and clicking away madly.  Since autoexec in Win 7 is not always a team player, you can also use/download a macro maker and record the mouse clicks required for the restarts at bootup (but not the Properties; once done, they're done).  Then set the macro to start automatically at Windows boot.  Run minimized once you are satisfied it's working.  I used a freebie, Easy Macro Recorder from CNET, but any will likely work.

 

I have the idea it's really working because I can occasionally see the ghost-click rearing its head, just to be smacked down by the component restarts going on.  Once, my  login screen after going to sleep didn't click, I just pressed the ENTER key on the (working!) keyboard.  As I said, it's 99.9% fix, but I trust the machine enough to do real work on it now.  The two-glass Iconia PC is the best coffee-shop ice-breaker since scones beat out donuts.

 

By the way, you can put Windows 8/8.1 on this machine, and it would seem to be a good match.  YouTube's full of people who have done it.  I didn't like it so much and removed.  Not sure how to remedy ghost click in 8, it'll still be there if you don't.

philetus

Hopefully others with this problem will see this and fix theirs.