Computers - staying in control

.
Staying in control, when running an unfamiliar operating system on an unfamiliar machine, can be a bit difficult sometimes.

Recently, I found myself getting increasingly exasperated by Windows 7 on my first laptop, where the touchpad would keep dragging things where I didn't want them to be dragged, or closing a viewing folder when I merely wanted to finger-tip-move to an adjacent folder.

It was like the system was second-guessing me, or making decisions on my behalf. Turned out that, all I needed to do was

disable tap-to-click on laptop touch pad

Now, when I googled the problem, I'd never even heard of tap-to-click, so I googled for "mousepad second-guesses me," or "touchpad anticipates my clicks," or something like that, and found many pages about this damned "tap-to-click" thing.

All that's needed to cure it is START > Control Panel > Mouse > Device Settings > Settings > Tapping > disable tapping.

So it wasn't the laptop being rebellious, or Windows 7 being a pile of rubbish. It was just a default setting that didn't suit me.

It made me wonder, though:

I wonder how many people buy a computer from a shop and then struggle along with a problem, not realising that their life needn't be like that, and that computers are supposed to obey our every whim. We shouldn't have to accomodate ourselves to the computer's whims.