My trackpad is sluggish and jerky

Question

I have a MacBook Pro (Summer 2010) with a dual-core 2.4Ghz processor. I am relatively new to Apple MacBooks (having been a Windows user for a number of years).
The transition from Windows to Apple is not that smooth or easy, I'd have to say!
What I am currently finding difficulty with is the trackpad. The experience is just not anywhere near as good as the most modest current Windows laptop.
What! I hear you say?
My experience is that the trackpad is sometimes sluggish, sometimes jerky, the cursor sometimes sticks momentarily.
This affects my experience of Lion - so that, for instance, scrolling down through a document, I find that the scrolling motion stops, a dialogue box opens asking me what to do with the current page (reload, etc - five or so options). The vertical scrollbar at the right of the screen appears, and I decide at this point to scroll down the document using the scroll bar (which I am sure is not what is intended for the Lion experience).
I run Windows 7 on Bootcamp - and the experience on Windows 7 is again sluggish, jerky, sometimes intermittent.
I am wondering if the trackpad is faulty, or if I need to reset it in some way.
The experience is as if the trackpad (or even the cursor) was had been smeared with (digital) jam (which it hasn't!).
Can anyone help? Or am I barking at the moon?

Answer 1

Hi there.  This problem is talked about in at least four discussions on the apple support site, and none of them have a clear "silver bullet" answer.
However, my own experience with this problem (in my case, I'm lucky, it comes up more rarely) ... plus some of the responses, points to one thing at least:
The "jerky, sluggish trackpad" problem sometimes happens when the computer or its network activity is at a high pitch.   Whether it just bogs down the CPU, or if instead it's creating some extra wifi interference or something (ok, that one does sound doubtful) who knows.  But it's good to look at what kind of heavy network or CPU process might be going on during that "sluggish trackpad" time.
In my case, what triggered the jerky-trackpad symptom was when I had my Picasa application do a big sync which involved uploading 500 photos to google's servers. When that process ended, the trackpad was smooth as can be.
And what could it be in your case?  One person with the problem said that they just got their computer. That brings to mind the fact that when your computer is newly installed, it needs to do a big indexing of your hard drive for the "spotlight" search tool in the far upper right of your Finder screen.   When it's indexing, a moving dot appears in the middle of the magnifying-glass icon.   OR... any other big process.  Consider quitting all apps other than the finder... stopping a big download or upload or bit torrent (heavens no!) process.... thinking about oddball apps you have installed... etc.
Anyway, this is just one possibility for the trackpad problem... one that proved relevant in my case.
Eric