Vaio Z Canvas Finger Touches Lost

My Vaio Canvas Z Windows 10 stops accepting finger touches constantly
Once it stops working, sometimes it wont start working unless I stop typing for several seconds

Ive tried ...

all these steps:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-my/help/4023476/surface-surface-touchscreen-problems-with-touch

and run msconfig and disabled all non ms services

and run Spybot-Anti-Beacon to disable all ms spyware

and just ordered a new AC adapter. Seems to happen more when plugged in to AC

My new Windows 10 Samsung Notebook 9 15" has a similar problem
https://www.samsung.com/us/computin...k-series-9/notebook-9-pro-15--np940x5m-x01us/

is there any windows touchscreen machine that works as well as android phones, at never missing a touch?

has anyone overcome a similar issue?

 

I've had touch detection problems in my ZC, which I suspect is voltage drift on the touchscreen sensor (more detail in this thread).

This drift seems to cause errant touch detection on the top-left corner of the screen (near the VAIO logo) and errant pen detection on the top-right corner of the screen.

I've posted a few possible workarounds here, but the most reliable procedure I've found is to:

1) Unplug your device
2) Set brightness to maximum (this clears the drift half-the-time)
3) Run the battery down to zero, incrementally decreasing brightness to zero before shut-off
4) Plug the machine in, and boot up and increase the brightness to your normal level

This method is my ad-hoc way to "recalibrate" the voltage detection on the screen. So far it's helped me get out of most of the strange digitizer states the ZC sometimes enters.

 

My opinion, its 100% software based, windows does not yet properly know how to support complicated functions like stylus input, even though it has some bling facade that looks pretty. I guess I cant blame windows entirely, for the most part it has worked as intended I guess the problem may lie more with browsers. The support for digitizer input with chrome, firefox, etc... is atrocious.

So yea i own the canvas, its my favorite piece of of hardware, but i do know what it is your refering to, it happens in almost all notebooks with pen input. I was even trying to get linux to run on the canvas to check if the OS would do the same thing. Ill try to explain, what happens with myn is when using the stylus, the stylus will stop recognizing input for a few seconds, sometimes it last longer like 5 seconds, then it comes back. It always felt to me like, you know in windows, for all you windows users, through out the years, when a rogue background task starts constantly making the processor wind up and down for no reason, and for a few seconds, the computer will act like its being taken hostage, its just like that. For some, its such a little nuisance that its put up with. Thats why I think its software based, see I use my canvas to browse, and when i do i never browse for the most part without using the stylus, im a stylus browser, just feels natural to me, so I do know exactly what it is your refering to. I made a thread on here where we discuessed what could be possible making it happen, but alas, nothing.

The only thing I would suggest to you if it really bothers you, and we are in fact talking about the same thing, is to do a fresh install of windows 10, keep all your processes in check, and see if that helps, i have way to many processors admitaly on my canvas and Im not going to do a fresh install cause I like my setup and thats the way I use my PC's, but most advanced users will want to do a fresh installs of OS when they get their devices, as Im more into reliability I choose differently then to start messing with tested software/hardware. You could also try installing linux on it some way and seeing if the problem persists, then you could determine if it is in actuality a software or hardware issue. I cant speak for the touch input, but like I said i can refer to the digitizer input, and it does it all the time, its become normal to me, like when you have to wait for a program to load for a few seconds, you just wait for the digitizer to start recognizing again and it comes back.

I did contact vaio about it, they wanted me to send them a video and do all this crap, I kinda just let it go though as I do really love my canvas. We may be talking about different issues here tho, I think what i experience is software related. Like say for instance, if you got the idea im trying to explain where the digitizer hangs for a few seconds then comes back to life and everything starts working normally, like a rogue processor making your CPU wind up for a few seconds, causing the pc to slow down for a second, this happens say, in a 3 hours browsing session, it could happen, maybee 40 or 50 times, for a second each. So like every 10 or 15 minutes, the digitizer, like iv tried explaining 4 times already in this post, it hangs for a few seconds then comes back to life. Its really hard to explain, and its weird that no one else seems to know exactly what it is im refering to, but i had similar issues with n-trig on my asus taichi, so i know its software related in some way, is my presumption.

Its just one of those issues that a select few have when your buying niche hardware and using it differently then 99% of the pool of pc users. Its hard ti explain and diagnose, their is a simple solution out their somewhere.

 

Thanks. Tried your suggestions. but no joy

 

jbaks, you are describing exactly what I'm seeing.
I removed every app I could
used windows perf mon to watch network, disk, and cpu.
Found no rouge process.
My guess is a combo of
- bad power supply
- ms spyware
- driver issue

it's like a buffer overrun error caused a fault in the driver and there is a timeout before the driver starts working again.

it's definitely related to power in my case.

video here

 

Does that keep happening, what I mean is can you get it to stop doing it for a time so its usable? Myn doesn't constantly do it. just like I described, it only happens maybe a few times in a 15 minute period.

Also, if you type calibrate in the search area next to the start icon, their is a program you can try to reconfigure the touch screen, called "Calibrate the screen for pen and touch input", worth a shot. Try booting into safe mode if you feel so inclined, and see if its doing it in that as well. I havent used safe mode since windows xp so dont ask me how you do it.

Last resort is to have a technician take it apart and inspect motherboard and all connections for faults, even so these are extremly easy to break and im sure their are next to no computer shops that would be able to handle something like this as its extremely niche product that has been discontinued. Hope you can get it working!!

 

This issue comes and goes.

The pen generally works, but the taping on glass is kinnda annoying.

I have tried calibration many times.

good idea about safe mode.
I don't know if that includes the touch screen driver. I'll give it a try.

I wonder if there are any windows touchscreens that really work.
too bad Android doesn't have any 12+" tablets anymore. their touch interface is pretty good.

thanks for all your help.
.

 

@Mike Lawrence have you tried touching the metal chassis with your other hand while touching the screen? (eg. holding the tablet like a clipboard)

From the video, it looks like it's related to the digitizer grounding issue I described here.

 

@Marty
ding. ding. ding.

I think you are correct. Touching the chassis makes it as good as using it unplugged.

Either way it works 90% of the time which is just enough to drive me crazy.

Do you know of any large windows tabs with touchscreens that work 99.99999% of the time?
I don't see this problem on any phones touchscreens.

 

Unfortunately, I don't.

Every touchscreen digitizer tech: be it N-Trig, Wacom AES and Wacom EMR+touch and even Apple AES all have reported bug threads, with their own idiosyncrasies to deal with.

That said, the ZC and SP5 do seem to be only ones with this particular touch problem (grounding issue).

Generally though, it could be the larger the touch surface, the more difficult it is to calibrate and maintain the sensing grid, hence why phones do not exhibit touch problems.