Intermittent trackpad responsiveness after replacing cable
Hey all. Have a weird issue ongoing with my trackpad intermittently becoming laggy and semi-responsive.
Initially, the trackpad on my Macbook stopped working. Upon inspection, a piece of sand had gotten in and stuck between the casing and battery/trackpad cable. Somehow the heat generated caused the piece of sand to get hot enough to burn a miniature hole through the trackpad cable. Crazy. Thankfully, it didn’t go thru fully and do damage to the battery.
Anyway, I’ve replaced the trackpad flex cable since and the trackpad is working again, but with intermittent issues. When the laptop is turned on, the trackpad often works perfectly. Then, during usage it starts to become semi-unresponsive. The pointer doesn’t fully track my finger movements and the haptic feedback becomes intermittent.
Sometimes, this doesn’t happen at all. And sometimes it’s happening from the moment I turn it on.
When this happens, it never seems to go back to full working order. A restart doesn’t fix the issue. But shutting down and resetting the NVRAM often does work, until it occurs again.
I thought the trackpad cable I’d received was faulty, so I bought another one and replaced the original replacement. Same issue. So the trackpad cable is not at fault.
Next step for me is to replace the trackpad itself, thinking maybe it has become defective. But thought I’d ask here incase anyone has any software related suggestions. The NVRAM reset temporary fix has thrown me off a bit.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!
From CoconutBattery:
And from Apple Diagnostics:
Screenshot of kernal_task from Activity Monitor (taken 10 minutes after turning the system on):
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4 comentarios
Let’s get a better view of things, I'm wondering your battery is just out of gas, install this gem of an app! CoconutBattery take a snapshot of the apps main window and post it here for us to see Agregar imágenes a una pregunta existente
You may want to run the onboard diagnostics to see if any errors pop. Restart your system and press the D key
Reference: Mac startup key combinations
- de Dan
@Dan Done! Thank you for your response. Appreciate any help I can get here.
- de Matthew Ruddy
Let's open up Activity Monitor app in your utilities folder. Locate the process kernel_task how much processing time is it taking?
If its taking up quite a lot that points to a sensor problem so your systems SMC is reducing the CPU's clocking putting your system into CPU Safe Mode to protect it from over heating.
- de Dan
Thanks @Dan. I've added a screenshot of this to my original post.
As a side note, this is my primary work machine so I nearly always have it plugged into an external monitor with external trackpad and keyboard. It rarely gets turned off during the day.
When the Macbook internal trackpad starts to act up, the external trackpad still works perfectly. I can continue using the machine as normal. It doesn't slow down in any way either, plugged in or on battery, it's still super quick (thankfully!).
I'm mostly working in Ruby on Rails so running a server locally and some bash commands to compile frontend code. Can be hard on the CPU but haven't noticed any performance change.
- de Matthew Ruddy