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No help, but appropriate! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Do you keep your mobile phone between an external keyboard/mouse and your laptop?
I ask this because the radio emissions(bluetooth, wireless, and network) from a mobile device will interfere with your laptop's communication with an external wireless mouse or keyboard.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Good thinking, but not the case here. I've just watched it bring up and close the menu on it's own twice in the last 5 minutes and the phone is in another room. 
I'm now disabling background processes to see if I can find the culprit...it seems to me like a software issue.
(16 hours later...interrupted by supper/movie/sleep)
The laptop stayed on all night, and the issue persists...it never went into screensaver/sleep/standby. As a matter of fact, my home office is across the hall from the bedroom, so I could watch the ambient light from the screen change every time the menu would pop itself up, then disappear seconds, or sometimes minutes later. This morning, the cooling fans were running at full speed, so I reboot it...hasn't messed up in the hour since then. 
But, now to another issue that I've been noticing. I have a new system that when coming out of standby, displays the login screen, but the password box is filled.  (30 chars to be exact and not my password) Maybe I'm being hacked!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Isnt there a tracker pad download for the laptop? My Dell was a royal PITA till I dl'ed theirs, and disabled some stuff, like mouse gestures and so on.
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It's Pazuzu, get an exorcist !
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boot from a Windows or Linux live CD (or flash drive) to rule out the OS/drivers. Take it to some place away from all wireless devices to eliminate interference.
User: Technical term used by developers. See Idiot.
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My Laptop is a Dell, but since you haven't had any luck. I had a similar problem. It was the driver on my touchscreen that kept 'thinking', (must be cortana tracking my every move), I was touching it. I finally disable the touch screen and the problem went away.
HTH.
Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one.
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 Thanks for the advice! Yes it is a touchscreen (that I've never uses) and I've just disabled it.  So far, so good!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I had a reasonable horsepower Vista machine which I decided to do a fresh install to Win10 on a new SSD. Part of that involved reloading the display driver from Dell. Everything worked fine, until when some unknown update from 1607 in the direction of 1709, the machine bricked. When booting, I would see a message that Windows didn't like something, wants to revert to the previous version, then it reboots and repeats the process.
I didn't actually like the Windows 10 fresh install solution since I had about 100 software products and pre-configured thingies that were useful to me. I decided to upgrade the Vista system to Windows 7 to Windows 10, then moved the resulting partition to the SSD. I reloaded the display driver. Everything worked fine ... until some unknown update.
Long story short, I now have no end of problems with drivers. Right now I am at the state where the desktop gains focus about every 59-72 seconds, the desktop goes black for about a second, any instance of Explorer, control panel or file open dlg closes and my current app of interest loses focus (including browser, word etc.). The desktop comes back, and start menu (hidden for me) comes alive and focus goes to the desktop. Various pages found by Google say that it is a wary driver that is at fault (or a short list of several known problematic apps). Most drivers have to do with either sound or display driver. I've spent about 4 man days on this in the last couple of weeks. Not solved yet.
I've not been in a complementary mood towards Microsoft for the last month.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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I have to login to a government site and I can set up password recovery.
They need my email and a secret question and answer.
I get to pick from four pre-defined questions, but they are so difficult that even I can't answer them!
The easiest is the expiration date of my drivers license, but that will change once it expires and of course I won't remember what it was when I get my next drivers license.
Another one is my client number of my electricity company, that only changes every year when I switch company...
The answers to the questions are so hard I am literally forced to write them down somewhere (and keep copies and backups).
Great job government, this will make everything so much more secure! 
I'll just not set up password recovery and hope I'll remember this password to a service I need once or twice a year...
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Who on Hell would want to divide his great great great great grandson by two?
That would be gross.
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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I was talking about the letter, but don't let me stop you in some good old slicing and dicing 
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Quote: Who on Hell would want to divide his great great great great grandson by two?
Isaac? If God told him to....
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No password-reset option? Write a mail, ask them how they store their passwords - I'd not be using a site that feels insecure.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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It's the Belastingdienst (tax authorities).
I don't really have a choice in this 
There is a reset option, but it involves making a phone call and waiting for a (or two?) letter(s) with your new username and password.
One can only wonder why...
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Sander Rossel wrote: I don't really have a choice in this
There's always a choice; even for those without a phone, as it is not mandated by law that you own one.
Sander Rossel wrote: There is a reset option, but it involves making a phone call and waiting for a (or two?) letter(s) with your new username and password.
One can only wonder why...
Because they don't trust your email-address, and no-one steals letters from a letterbox - it is so much safer.
It's usually delivered in a few days
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I have the choice to do it easy, by email.
Or I can do it the hard way, visiting them at their physical address.
That's not really a choice to me
Haven't you heard, your snail mail is now delivered with super secure SHA-512 encryption!
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I'll be mailing them about their password-rules again then, asking for the idiot who is responsible, and their motivation.
These are expensive "academics" and still they make mistakes that one expects from a first-year student.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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...and the decryption key is provided on the back of the envelope...?
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The mailman will read it out loud at the door
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It's just like the change your password every 30 days policy I have at work.
It means that everyone picks a password then simply increments a number at the end of every 30 days.
This means that if anyone cracks your password without you realising - they can hack your account well into the future.
Security measures should be there to slow down unauthorised access and as you have pointed out some modern security practises have actually decreased security.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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For that reason we have the policy that your new password must be at least x% different from your old password... 
But I've seen the increment as well.
In one such scenario I've even seen that an entire team got one account to access some server.
Every month the person who changed the password would send out an email saying "the new password increment is now 19" (this was important, because after 3 failed attempts you'd be blocked and in for a world of pain trying to get it back).
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