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Hi everyone. Um, so about a week and a half ago, I started having really strange issues
with my Wacom Intuos 4 tablet, which you can see here. So I'm just going to show you what
that looks like. I'm just going to use the stylus as I would normally and on my computer
I have Paint opened up so you can kinda see what's happening. So (laughs) well, you can
kind of tell what's going on. So, just for reference, here's what I'm doing with the
stylus, it's not touching the tablet surface at all, I'm just hovering and this should
ordinarily just be moving my cursor around. But you can see that what's happening is it's
just like, clicking, on its own randomly, um, right now it's just clicking because I
have the settings for these clicker buttons on the tablet (sic) disabled, uh, on the stylus
disabled, if I use - I used to have them set to right click and uh...something else, I
can't remember, and basically it - I would just be getting random input from both those
two buttons and just the regular pen tapping action. So yeah, you can see that it's behaving
as though I am pressing down on the pen even when I'm not, and this also changes depending
on the angle of the pen that I hold things at. So right now I'm holding the pen almost
flat, like this, and when I do that there isn't really much of that going on. But once
I hold the pen as you would normally when using it, like this, or like - the problem
gets worse if I hold it vertically, this basically starts happening, and I can still use it normally,
so... oops...well, normally is a relative term because when it's right clicking on its
own it's kind of hard to actually do anything. But uh...yeah, so I left this alone for a
week I thought maybe the problem would go away on its own, it didn't. I actually took
the entire pen apart and what I managed to verify was that the problem still happened
even if I was just using the very minimal core in the tablet, so I'll just show you
what that looks like. Not going to take the whole pen apart but this is what it looks
like on one end, the eraser side, so you can see that this thing in the background here,
that's actually a magnetic core I think and a bit of wire wrapped around it, and this
whole assembly is what gives you the pressure sensitivity. And the other side pretty much
looks the same. So that was happening and I mean, that's pretty messed up. And I thought
it was an issue with the stylus, but today I borrowed another intuos i know is working
from the school library, and um, i plugged that in and let it install the drivers, and
the same thing happened. i tried using the stylus from that tablet with my tablet, and
same thing. i just found this out by pure luck, but, um, it's - i mean i'm hoping this
will help me figure out what is going on at least so i know what part i have to replace
or what to fix. so yeah, here's my tablet currently doing its own thing, and notice
that my power supply is plugged in. and so...if i just remove that. everything is fine. and
so i think this leaves two options for what actually is happening, one might be some kind
of power profile issue, maybe something weird is happening with the software? i did restart
at one point and for the first maybe one and a half minutes after startup this wasn't happening
so there might be some software thing going on. another possibility i think is something
to do with magnet- like, electromagnets or something. so definitely there's something
going on when you plug the power in, the circuit's complete, there's an electric current flowing,
some kind of magnetic effect has to happen and i think that might be having an impact
on the pen stylus, maybe? but um, yeah, i'm not really sure why this only started happening
a week and a half ago and i am - my next step is to borrow a computer from some one else,
install the tablet drivers on that computer and see if the same problem happens when i
plug in the power supply there. just to see if this problem happens on another computer.
if it does, i know i'm probably screwed and i have to get a new computer, if not, well,
then i have some hope. it may be a software issue, i will have to dig into - i don't even
know where i would look but um, yeah, that's my current troubleshooting update, i will
keep you guys posted as i try and figure out what is going wrong with this really expensive
piece of hardware (laughs)